Punjabi · ਪੰਜਾਬੀ

About Punjabi

Language family

Indo-European, Indo-Aryan

Where it's spoken

The Punjab region, split between India and Pakistan

Speakers

roughly 125–150 million speakers, among the most spoken languages in the world

Punjabi is unusual among Indo-Aryan languages for being genuinely tonal, a feature that developed as certain consonant sounds were lost over time and their effect shifted onto pitch instead. It is written in the Gurmukhi script in India (also the script of the Sikh scriptures) and in a Perso-Arabic Shahmukhi script in Pakistan, making it one of the few major languages split across two writing systems along a national border. Its close relatives Hindi and Urdu share much of its core grammar.