- Official language in
- India
- Also spoken in
- Pakistan
- Script
- Gurmukhi
Where it's spoken
Punjabi is described as the official language of the Indian state of Punjab, with additional official status in Delhi and widespread use in Haryana. This status follows from a mechanism set out in India's constitution: rather than naming one official language for the country as a whole, the constitution lets the legislature of a state adopt by law any language in use in that state as the state's own official language. Punjab is also the most populous province of Pakistan, where Punjabi is nonetheless described as lacking official status. Pakistan's constitution instead names Urdu as the country's national language, provides that English may be used for official purposes until arrangements are made for Urdu to replace it, and separately lets a provincial assembly legislate for the teaching, promotion, and use of a provincial language in addition to the national language.
Sources
- Constitution of India (1949, as amended; text as reproduced by the Comparative Constitutions Project) — Art. 345 (state official-language mechanism)
- Ayres, Alyssa (2008). "Language, the Nation, and Symbolic Capital: The Case of Punjab." The Journal of Asian Studies 67(3): 917–946 — p.918 (official status in India; lack of official status in Pakistani Punjab); p.920 (Punjab as Pakistan's most populous province)
- Constitution of Pakistan (1973, as amended; text as reproduced by the Comparative Constitutions Project) — Art. 251 (national language)
Script & pronunciation
This app's Punjabi cards are written in the Gurmukhi script, described as a North Indian script used to write the Punjabi language of the Punjab state of India. Gurmukhi is attributed to Guru Angad, the second Sikh Guru, and is described as derived from an older script called Landa and closely related to Devanagari in structure. The script is described as closely associated with Sikhs and Sikhism and used on an everyday basis in the Indian Punjab; Punjabi in Pakistan's Punjab is instead described as written in the Arabic script. Punjabi is described as a tonal language, though Gurmukhi has no dedicated signs for tone: certain consonant letters, including some historically distinguished as voiced aspirates, instead combine consonant and tone functions. This app's Latin-script romanizations are not applied with a single consistent convention: some cards spell a word as one continuous string, as in ਧੰਨਵਾਦ → Dhannavaad ("Thank you"), while others separate each syllable with hyphens, as in ਬਹੁਤ ਮਜ਼ਾ ਆਇਆ → Ba-hut ma-za aa-i-aa ("I had a great time").
Sources
Grammar essentials
This academic reference grammar of Punjabi describes the order of words within a phrase as largely fixed, but the order of phrases within a clause as comparatively free — freer still in colloquial Punjabi, for which it says no norms can be established. For literary Punjabi, it identifies normal clause patterns in which the subject noun phrase comes first and the main verb phrase last, illustrated with examples it translates as "Mohan saw Sohan" (subject, indirect object, main verb) and "Mohan gave Sohan a cup" (subject, indirect object, direct object, main verb). This app's card ਮੈਂ ਮਾਸ ਨਹੀਂ ਖਾਂਦਾ ("I don't eat meat") follows the same subject-before-verb order, its own word breakdown giving "I" + "Meat" + "Don't eat" (marked there as the male-speaker form). The same grammar describes a noun's grammatical role as marked by postpositions rather than by words that precede the noun: it describes several of these as always immediately following the noun they mark, including one glossed "to" that also marks various verbal complements. This app's card ਮੈਨੂੰ ਪੰਜਾਬੀ ਨਹੀਂ ਆਉਂਦੀ ("I can't speak Punjabi") opens with ਮੈਨੂੰ ("to me"), and its own note frames the sentence as a dative construction built on the verb "to come." Negation is described as normally placing the negator before all the verbs in a verb phrase; this app's cards follow the same pattern, with both ਮੈਂ ਮਾਸ ਨਹੀਂ ਖਾਂਦਾ and ਮੈਨੂੰ ਪੰਜਾਬੀ ਨਹੀਂ ਆਉਂਦੀ placing ਨਹੀਂ directly before their verb. The same grammar also describes a Punjabi verb phrase as often agreeing with its subject noun phrase; this app's card ਮੈਂ ਮਾਸ ਨਹੀਂ ਖਾਂਦਾ notes that a female speaker uses ਖਾਂਦੀ in place of ਖਾਂਦਾ, since the verb agrees with the speaker's gender.
Sources
- Gill, Harjeet Singh; Gleason, Henry A. Jr. "A Reference Grammar of Punjabi." Punjabi University, Patiala (2013 revised edition, originally Hartford Studies in Linguistics no. 3, 1962) — §§5.12, 8.5, 10.7–10.8 (postpositions, concord, word order, negation)
Politeness & etiquette
This app's cards default to the polite ਤੁਸੀਂ when addressing someone you don't already know, as in ਕੀ ਤੁਸੀਂ ਅੰਗਰੇਜ਼ੀ ਬੋਲਦੇ ਹੋ? ("Do you speak English?"), whose own note says to use ਤੁਸੀਂ with strangers and reserve ਤੂੰ for close friends and family. The app's own card for ਤੁਸੀਂ itself translates it as "You (polite)," repeating the same note. This academic reference grammar separately describes the Punjabi imperative as having four forms — singular and plural, each in an ordinary and a polite form.
Sources
- Gill, Harjeet Singh; Gleason, Henry A. Jr. "A Reference Grammar of Punjabi." Punjabi University, Patiala (2013 revised edition, originally Hartford Studies in Linguistics no. 3, 1962) — §5.23 (imperative: ordinary/polite, singular/plural)