Saraiki (, , ; also spelt Siraiki, or Seraiki) is an Indo-Aryan language of the Lahnda group. "The existence of Lahnda as a separate language has long been recognised under various names such as Jatki, Multani, Hindki or Hindko and Western Panjabi....it is called Multani, but this name properly applies only to the form of Lahnda spoken around Multan and the neighbourhood." It is spoken by 28.84 million people, as per the 2023 Pakistani census, mostly in southern Punjab, northern Sindh and southern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
Saraiki has partial mutual intelligibility with Standard Punjabi,; see also and . and it shares with it a large portion of its vocabulary and morphology. At the same time in its phonology it is radically different (particularly in the lack of tones, the preservation of the voiced aspirates and the development of implosive consonants), and has important grammatical features in common with the Sindhi language spoken to the south.
Due to the effects of dominant languages in Pakistani media like Urdu, Standard Punjabi and English and the religious impact of Arabic and Persian, Saraiki, like other regional language varieties of Pakistan, is continuously expanding its vocabulary base with loan words.
Name The present extent of the meaning of is a recent development, and the term most probably gained its currency during the nationalist movement of the 1960s. It has been in use for much longer in Sindh to refer to the speech of the immigrants from the north, principally Siraiki-speaking Baloch tribes who settled there between the 16th and the 19th centuries. In this context, the term can most plausibly be explained as originally having had the meaning "the language of the north", from the Sindhi word 'up-river, north'.; ; This name can ambiguously refer to the northern dialects of Sindhi, but these are nowadays more commonly known as "Siroli" or "Sireli".
An alternative hypothesis is that Sarākī originated in the word sauvīrā, or Sauvira, an ancient kingdom which was also mentioned in the Sanskrit epic Mahabharata.
Currently, the most common rendering of the name is Saraiki. However, Seraiki and Siraiki have also been used in academia until recently. Precise spelling aside, the name was first adopted in the 1960s by regional social and political leaders.
Classification and related languages
Saraiki is a member of Lahnda sub family of the Indo-Aryan subdivision of the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European language family.
In 1919, George Abraham Grierson maintained that the dialects of what is now the southwest of Punjab Province in Pakistan constitute a dialect cluster, which he designated "Southern Lahnda" within a putative "Lahnda language". Subsequent Indo-Aryanist linguists have confirmed the reality of this dialect cluster, even while rejecting the name "Southern Lahnda" along with the entity "Lahnda" itself. Grierson also maintained that "Lahnda" was his novel designation for various dialects up to then called "Western Punjabi", spoken north, west, and south of Lahore. The local dialect of Lahore is the Majhi dialect of Punjabi, which has long been the basis of standard literary Punjabi. However, outside of Indo-Aryanist circles, the concept of "Lahnda" is still found in compilations of the world's languages (e.g. Ethnologue). Saraiki appears to be a transitional language between Punjabi and Sindhi. Spoken in Upper Sindh as well as the southern Panjab, it is sometimes considered a dialect of either Sindhi or of Panjabi due to a high degree of mutual intelligibility.
Dialects The following dialects have been tentatively proposed for Saraiki:This is the grouping in , which largely coincides with that in . Central Saraiki, including Multani: spoken in the districts of Dera Ghazi Khan, Muzaffargarh, Leiah, Multan, Bahawalpur and Taunsa. Southern Saraiki: prevalent in the districts of Rajanpur and Rahimyar Khan. Sindh Siraiki: dispersed throughout the Northern Sindh and in Kachhi Plain region in Balochistan province. Northern Saraiki, or Thali: spoken in the district of Dera Ismail Khan and the northern parts of the Thal region, including Mianwali and Bhakkar districts.
The historical inventory of names for the dialects now called Saraiki is a confusion of overlapping or conflicting ethnic, local, and regional designations. One historical name for Saraiki, Jaṭki, means "of the Jaṭṭs", a northern South Asian ethnic group. Only a small minority of Saraiki speakers are Jaṭṭs, and not all Saraiki speaking Jaṭṭs necessarily speak the same dialect of Saraiki. However, these people usually call their traditions as well as language as Jataki. Conversely, several Saraiki dialects have multiple names corresponding to different locales or demographic groups. The name "Derawali" is used to refer to the local dialects of both Dera Ghazi Khan and Dera Ismail Khan, but "Ḍerawali" in the former is the Multani dialect and "Derawali" in the latter is the Thaḷi dialect.
When consulting sources before 2000, it is important to know that Pakistani administrative boundaries have been altered frequently. Provinces in Pakistan are divided into districts, and sources on "Saraiki" often describe the territory of a dialect or dialect group according to the districts. Since the founding of Pakistan in 1947, several of these districts have been subdivided, some multiple times.
Status of language or dialect In the context of South Asia, the choice between the appellations "language" and "dialect" is a difficult one, and any distinction made using these terms is obscured by their ambiguity.See . For a brief discussion of the case of Saraiki, see . In a sense both Saraiki and Standard Panjabi are "dialects" of a "Greater Punjabi" macrolanguage. The term "Saraiki" was first introduced for the Multani, Riasti and Derawali dialects of this "Greater Punjabi" macrolanguage in the 1960s as a result of a sociopolitical movement. According to Pakistani politicians such as Hanif Ramay and Fakhar Zaman, the Saraiki linguistic movement was thought to have been pushed by feudal landowners of the Seraiki belt.
Saraiki was considered a dialect of Punjabi by most British colonial administrators, and is still seen as such by many Punjabis. Saraikis, however, consider it a language in its own right: "the Punjabis claim that Siraiki is a dialect of Punjabi, whereas the Siraikis call it a language in its own right." and see the use of the term "dialect" as stigmatising. A language movement was started in the 1960s to standardise a script and promote the language. The national census of Pakistan has tabulated the prevalence of Saraiki speakers since 1981.
Geographical distribution
Pakistan Saraiki is primarily spoken in the south-western part of the province of Punjab, in an area that broadly coincides with the extent of the proposed South Punjab Province. To the west, it is set off from the Pashto- and Balochi-speaking areas by the Suleiman Range, while to the south-east the Thar desert divides it from the Marwari language. Its other boundaries are less well-defined: Punjabi is spoken to the east; Sindhi is found to the south, after the border with Sindh province; to the north, the southern edge of the Salt Range is the rough divide with the northern varieties of Lahnda, such as Pothwari.
Saraiki is the first language of approximately 29 million people in Pakistan according to the 2023 census. The first national census of Pakistan to gather data on the prevalence of Saraiki was the census of 1981. In that year, the percentage of respondents nationwide reporting Saraiki as their native language was 9.83. In the census of 1998, it was 10.53% out of a national population of 132 million, for a figure of 13.9 million Saraiki speakers resident in Pakistan. Also according to the 1998 census, 12.8 million of those, or 92%, lived in the province of Punjab.Pakistan census 1998
India After Partition in 1947, Hindu and Sikh speakers of Saraiki migrated to India, where they are currently widely dispersed, though with more significant pockets in the states of Punjab, Haryana, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Delhi and Jammu and Kashmir. There is also a smaller group of Muslim pastoralists who migrated to India, specifically Andhra Pradesh, prior to Partition.
There are census figures available – for example, in the 2011 census, people reported their language as "Bahawal Puri", and as "Hindi Multani". However, these are not representative of the actual numbers, as the speakers will often refer to their language using narrower dialect or regional labels, or alternatively identify with the bigger language communities, like those of Punjabi, Hindi or Urdu. Therefore, the number of speakers in India remains unknown.; . There have been observations of Lahnda varieties "merging" into Punjabi (especially in Punjab and Delhi), as well as of outright shift to the dominant languages of Punjabi or Hindi. One pattern reported in the 1990s was for members of the younger generation to speak the respective "Lahnda" variety with their grandparents, while communicating within the peer group in Punjabi and speaking to their children in Hindi.
Phonology Saraiki's consonant inventory is similar to that of neighbouring Sindhi. It includes phonemically distinctive implosive consonants, which are unusual among the Indo-European languages. In Christopher Shackle's analysis, Saraiki distinguishes up to 48 consonants and 9 monophthong vowels.
Vowels The "centralised" vowels tend to be shorter than the "peripheral" vowels . The central vowel is more open and back than the corresponding vowel in neighbouring varieties. Vowel nasalisation is distinctive: 'may you go' vs. 'may he go'. Before , the contrast between and is neutralised. There is a high number of vowel sequences, some of which can be analysed as diphthongs. + Saraiki vowelsFront Near-frontCentral Near-backBackClose Near-close Mid Near-open Open
Consonants Saraiki possesses a large inventory of consonants:
Labial Dental/Alveolar Retroflex Post-alv./Palatal Velar Glottal Stop/Affricate voiceless aspirated voiced voiced aspirated implosive Nasal plain aspirated Fricative voiceless voiced voiced aspirated Tap plain aspirated Approximant plain aspirated
In its stop consonants, Saraiki has the typical for Indo-Aryan four-fold contrast between voiced and voiceless, and aspirated and unaspirated. In parallel to Sindhi it has additionally developed a set of implosives, so that for each place of articulation there are up to five contrasting stops, for example: voiceless 'custom' ~ aspirated 'blister' ~ implosive 'cobweb' ~ voiced 'niche' ~ voiced aspirate 'foam'.
There are five contrasting places of articulation for the stops: velar, palatal, retroflex, dental and bilabial. The dentals are articulated with the blade of the tongue against the surface behind the teeth. The retroflex stops are post-alveolar, the articulator being the tip of the tongue or sometimes the underside. There is no dental implosive, partly due to the lesser retroflexion with which the retroflex implosive is pronounced. The palatal stops are here somewhat arbitrarily represented with and . In casual speech some of the stops, especially , and , are frequently rendered as fricatives – respectively , and .
Of the nasals, only and are found at the start of a word, but in other phonetic environments there is a full set of contrasts in the place of articulation: . The retroflex is realised as a true nasal only if adjacent to a retroflex stop, elsewhere it is a nasalised retroflex flap . The contrasts ~ , and ~ are weak; the single nasal is more common in southern varieties, and the nasal + stop cluster is prevalent in central dialects. Three nasals have aspirated counterparts .