Sindhi language
Sindhi is an Indo-Aryan language belonging to the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European language family. It is primarily spoken by the Sindhi people native to the Pakistani province of Sindh, where the language has official status. It constitutes the mother tongue of over 34 million people in Pakistan, primarily concentrated in Sindh; with historic communities in neighbouring Balochistan as well. It is also spoken by 1.7 million people in India, mostly by the descendants of partition-era migrants; with it having the status of a scheduled language in the country without any state-level official status. Sindhi is written in the Sindhi alphabet of the Perso-Arabic script, the sole official script for the language in Pakistan; while in India, both the Perso-Arabic and Devanagari scripts are used.
With over 37 million native speakers, Sindhi is a major South Asian language, being the most-widely spoken language in southern Pakistan and third most-widely spoken in the entirety of Pakistan. The language is also geographically spread out of South Asia as it is spoken by the Sindhi diaspora, present around the world, primarily in the Gulf states, the Western world and the Far East.
Being classified under the Northwestern branch of the Indo-Aryan languages, Sindhi, apart from other Sindhic languages, is most closely related to Saraiki and Punjabi. It is descended from Shauraseni Prakrit, which gradually developed into Apabhraṃśa and then into [|Early Sindhi]. Sindhi further developed during the Islamic Golden Age and the Islamic period in South Asia, expanding its vocabulary under the influence of Arabic and Persian; with the earliest written evidence of Sindhi as a language being a translation of the Quran, dated back to 883 AD. [|Middle Sindhi] produced the language's greatest pieces of literature, including recorded forms of orally-transmitted folk tales; as well as Sufi literature, including Shah Jo Risalo, the single greatest piece of Sindhi literature, by Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai. [|Modern Sindhi] developed and was officially standardised and promoted during the British colonial era, replacing Persian as the primary official language of Sindh in 1848.
Sindhi is an inflected language, with five cases for [|noun], three for [|personal pronoun], four for [|third-person pronoun]; eleven [|case markers]; two genders ; and two numbers. The base of its vocabulary is derived from Sanskrit in the form of Prakrit and Apabhraṃśa, while a significant portion of its high-register speech is derived from Persian and Arabic, along with a number of recent loanwords borrowed from English; and to a lesser extent from Portuguese and French. It has also had minor influence from and on neighbouring languages such as Saraiki, Punjabi, Balochi, Brahui, Gujarati, and Marwari.
Sindhi has a number of [|dialects] and an established [|standard form], referred to as Standard Sindhi, which is based on the dialect of Hyderabad and surrounding areas of central Sindh. The primary regulatory agency for the development and promotion of the language is the Sindhi Language Authority, an autonomous institution of the government of Sindh.
History
Origins
The name "Sindhi" is derived from the Sanskrit síndhu, the original name of the Indus River, along whose delta Sindhi is spoken. In the Bronze Age, the primary language of this region was likely the Harappan language, but no records exist indicating when or how that language was replaced by the Indo-Aryan languages.Like other languages of the Indo-Aryan family, Sindhi is descended from Old Indo-Aryan via Middle Indo-Aryan. 20th century Western scholars such as George Abraham Grierson believed that Sindhi descended specifically from the Vrācaḍa dialect of Apabhramsha but later work has shown this to be unclear.
The sound changes that characterise the development of Sindhi from Middle Indo-Aryan are:
- Development of implosives from geminate and initial stops ; this is a highly distinctive sound change in NIA
- Shortening of geminates
- Voicing of post-nasal consonants
- Debuccalization of intervocalic -s- > -h-
- Intervocalic -l- > -r-, -ll- > -l-, -ḍ- > -ṛ-
- Fronting of r from medial clusters to initial
- Retention of MIA -ṇ-
- Retention of final short vowels -a, -i, -u, but also insertion of these into loanwords
- Retention of long vowels before geminates
- Retention of stop + r clusters but with retroflexion, e.g. tr- > ṭr-
- Retention of ''v-''
Early Sindhi (–16th century)
Sindhi was the first Indo-Aryan language to be in close contact with Arabic and Persian following the Umayyad conquest of Sindh in 712 CE. Arabic sources thus do mention the language of Sindh in various instances. The following excerpts are translated from The History of India, as Told by Its Own Historians by Henry Miers Elliot.
Additionally, the Korean Buddhist monk Hyech'o mentions the unique language of Sindh in his travelogue:
Medieval Sindhi (16th–19th centuries)
Medieval Sindhi literature is of a primarily religious genre, comprising a syncretic Sufi and Advaita Vedanta poetry, the latter in the devotional bhakti tradition. The format of this poetry is the bayt, indicating significant influence from Arabic and Persian. The earliest known Sindhi poet of the Sufi tradition is Qazi Qadan. Other early poets were Shah Inat Rizvi and Shah Abdul Karim Bulri. These poets had a mystical bent that profoundly influenced Sindhi poetry for much of this period.Another famous part of Medieval Sindhi literature is a wealth of folktales, adapted and readapted into verse by many bards at various times and possibly much older than their earliest literary attestations. These include romantic epics such as Sassui Punnhun, Sohni Mahiwal, Momal Rano, Noori Jam Tamachi, Lilan Chanesar, and others.
The greatest poet of Sindhi was Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai, whose verses were compiled into the Shah Jo Risalo by his followers. While primarily Sufi, his verses also recount traditional Sindhi folktales and aspects of the cultural history of Sindh.
The first attested Sindhi translation of the Quran was done by Akhund Azaz Allah Muttalawi and published in Gujarat in 1870. The first to appear in print was by Muhammad Siddiq in 1867.
British India (1843–1947)
In 1843, the British conquest of Sindh led the region to become part of the Bombay Presidency. Soon after, in 1848, Governor George Clerk established Sindhi as the official language in the province, removing the literary dominance of Persian. Sir Bartle Frere, the then commissioner of Sindh, issued orders on August 29, 1857, advising civil servants in Sindh to pass an examination in Sindhi. He also ordered the use of Sindhi in official documents. In 1868, the Bombay Presidency assigned Narayan Jagannath Vaidya to replace the Abjad used in Sindhi with the Khudabadi script. The script was decreed a standard script by the Bombay Presidency thus inciting anarchy in the Muslim majority region. A powerful unrest followed, after which Twelve Martial Laws were imposed by the British authorities. The granting of official status of Sindhi along with script reforms ushered in the development of modern Sindhi literature.The first printed works in Sindhi were produced at the Muhammadi Press in Bombay beginning in 1867. These included Islamic stories set in verse by Muhammad Hashim Thattvi, one of the renowned religious scholars of Sindh.
Independent Pakistan and India (1947–)
The Partition of India in 1947 resulted in most Sindhi speakers ending up in the new state of Pakistan, commencing a push to establish a strong sub-national linguistic identity for Sindhi. This manifested in resistance to the imposition of Urdu and eventually Sindhi nationalism in the 1980s.The language and literary style of contemporary Sindhi writings in Pakistan and India were noticeably diverging by the late 20th century; authors from the former country were borrowing extensively from Urdu, while those from the latter were highly influenced by Hindi.
Geographical distribution
Sindhi is the official language of the Pakistani province of Sindh and one of the scheduled languages of India, where it does not have any state-level status. Prior to the inception of Pakistan, Sindhi was the national language of Sindh.Sindhi is additionally spoken by many members of the Sindhi diaspora, particularly in Malaysia, Oman, Singapore, UAE, USA and UK.
Pakistan
In Pakistan, Sindhi is the first language of 34.40 million people, or % of the country's population as of the 2023 census. 33.46 million of these are found in Sindh, where they account for % of the total population of the province. There are 0.55 million speakers in the province of Balochistan, especially in the Kacchi Plain.| State | Population | ||
''' Languages of|PakistanIndiaThe Indian Government has legislated Sindhi as a scheduled language in India, making it an option for education. Despite lacking any state-level status, Sindhi is still a prominent minority language in the Indian states of Gujarat, Rajasthan and Maharashtra. In India, Sindhi mother tongue speakers were distributed in the following states:
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