Saraiki language

Saraiki
Native to	Pakistan, India
Native speakers	13.9 million in Pakistan (1998 Population and Housing Census, Pakistan), 68,000 in India (Census of India, 2001) (combined figure for persons claiming either the Multani dialect or the Bahawalpuri dialect; the name "Saraiki" not used in India)
Language family	Indo-European Indo-Iranian Indo-Aryan North-Western Zone Saraiki
Writing system	Arabic alphabet, Gurmukhi script, Devanagari script
Language codes
ISO 639-2	inc
ISO 639-3	skr

Sarāikī (Perso-Arabic: سراییکی, Gurmukhi: ਸਰਾਇਕੀ, Devanagari: सराइकी), commonly spelled Seraiki, also Siraiki, is a new standard written language of Pakistan belonging to the Indo-Aryan (Indic) languages. Saraiki is based on a group of vernacular dialects very similar to one another spoken in the southern half of Punjab Province and in adjacent northern parts of Sindh Province by over 14 million people, as well as by nearly 70,000 emigrants and their descendants in India. Historically, these are unwritten dialects. They are similar to the core dialects of Punjabi, which are spoken to their northeast. The development of the standard language of Saraiki, a process which began after the founding of Pakistan in 1947, has been driven by a regionalist political movement. Since 1981, the national census of Pakistan has tabulated Saraiki among the nation's mother tongues.

The English language spelling of the name, specifically the vowel of the first syllable, is not agreed on even within Pakistan. The name in general was adopted in the 1960's by regional social and political leaders. The name is widely considered to have originated with the word for "northern" in the neighboring Sindhi language (see discussion below), and linguists specializing in the language have consistently used the 'i' spelling for the vowel of the first syllable. But among nonlinguists "Saraiki", "Siraiki", and "Seraiki" are all found, with the last possibly the most frequent (all three spellings represent short vowel sounds). As for the native scripts, the 'a' spelling (or rather, its native equivalent) is the standard. In the Gurmukhi and Devanagari spellings given above, this is manifested by the lack of any vowel diacritic, as is typical of native Indo-Aryan orthographies, where the absence of any diacritic indicates the vowel sound, short 'a', while diacritics are used to indicate any other vowel sound.

Geographic distribution and number of speakers

Saraiki (or the vernacular dialect cluster which is being standardised in writing under the name "Saraiki") is native to what is now the southwestern half of Punjab Province in Pakistan. The historical territory of this dialect cluster bounded to the north by the Salt Range (a mountain range south of the national capital of Islamabad), to the south by Sindh Province, to the west by a line west of the Indus River and near that river, and to the east by a north-south line well west of the metropolis of Lahore. In 1919, Grierson maintained that the dialects this area constituted a dialect cluster, which he designated "Southern Lahnda" within a putative "Lahnda language". Subsequent linguists have confirmed the reality of this dialect cluster, even while rejecting other aspects of Grierson's scheme of classification, including Grierson's name for it. Saraiki is also spoken in Sindh Province, particularly the north of that province; Sindhi is also spoken in that area.

According to the Indian census of 2001, Saraiki is spoken by about 70,000 people spread throughout northwest and north central India. They are Partition refugees and their descendants who reported speaking either "Multani" (56,096 persons) or "Bahawalpuri" (11,873).

The national census of Pakistan included Saraiki for the first time in the census of 1981. (The four major languages of Pakistan are Punjabi, Pashto, Sindhi, and Saraiki, in descending order.) In that year, the percentage of respondents nationwide reporting Saraiki as their mother tongue was 9.83. In the census of 1998, it was 10.53 out of a national population of 400 million, for a figure of 400 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. The next census of Pakistan will be conducted in October 2008.

but the truth figures that the Saraiki speakings are above 7 Carors its mean Saraiki are above 7000 million in all over the pakisaan.

Classification within Indo-Aryan

Saraiki is part of a dialect continuum with Punjabi and Sindhi. Punjabi, Saraiki, and Sindhi are all members of the Indo-Aryan subdivision of the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European language family. By the strictly linguistic criterion of mutual intelligibility, Saraiki dialects form a common language with dialects uncontroversially recognized as Punjabi. All the same, dialects of "Saraiki" are distinct from dialects of "Punjabi" in consonant inventory as well as in the structure of the verb.

The linguist George Abraham Grierson in his multivolume Linguistic Survey of India (1904-1928) considered the various dialects up to then called "western Punjabi", spoken north, west, and south of Lahore in what is now Pakistani Punjab, as constituting instead a distinct language from Punjabi. (The local dialect of Lahore is the Majhi dialect of Punjabi, which has long been the basis of standard literary Punjabi.) Grierson proposed to name this putative language "Lahnda", and he dubbed as "Southern Lahnda" the coherent dialect cluster now known as Saraiki. Investigators since Grierson have rejected the "Lahnda" proposal. The communities speaking these dialects historically did not constitute a single, self conscious ethnicity. Although Grierson noted that the name Siraiki (the spelling he used) is a Sindhi word meaning '[language] of the north' (sirō), Shackle asserts that this etymology is unverified and is merely the most plausible one advanced.

There is a tendency for some discussions of the Saraiki dialects and their emerging standard literary language to incorrectly include dialects or languages spoken farther north, in particular Hindko. This error is due to confusion between Saraiki (Grierson's "Southern Lahnda") and the larger category of Lahnda. While these dialects to the north of the Salt Range are considerably similar to Saraiki in linguistic structure, ever since Grierson they have been recognised as definitely distinct from dialects spoken south of the range. Furthermore, their territories are not involved in the Saraiki regionalist movement.

Dialects of Saraiki

The historical inventory of names for the dialects now called Saraiki is a confusion of overlapping or conflicting ethnic, local, and regional designations. "Hindki" and "Hindko" -- which means merely "of Hindus" -- refer to various Saraiki and even non-Saraiki dialects in Punjab Province and farther north within the country, due to the fact they were applied by invaders from Afghanistan or Persia. One historical name for Saraiki, Jaṭki, means "of the Jaṭṭs", a northern South Asian ethnic group; but Jaṭṭs speak the Indo-Aryan dialect of whatever region they live in. Only a small minority of Saraiki speakers are Jaṭṭs, and not all Saraiki speaking Jaṭṭs necessarily speak the same dialect of Saraiki. Conversely, several Saraiki dialects have multiple names corresponding to different locales or demographic groups. In Pakistan, an additional source of confusion when tabulating dialects is evolving administrative boundaries. 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. Until 2001, the territorial structure of Pakistan included a layer of Divisions between a Province and its Districts. The name dialect name "Ḍerawali" 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 "Ḍerawali" in the latter is the Thaḷi dialect.

Shackle 1976 has proposed a tentative classification of Saraiki dialects into six "varieties", wherein variety is defined as a group of dialects. (Shackle's scheme really involves just five "varieties", since he himself observes that Shahpuri, spoken in Sargodha District and parts of neighboring districts, is in truth not a kind of Saraiki, but instead a dialect of Punjabi with Saraiki features.) The precise geographical distribution of these dialect groups is unknown. The six are dubbed Central (i.e., Multani); Southern (i.e., Bahawalpuri, spoken primarily in Rahim Yar Khan district and in Bahawalpur District south of the city of Bahawalpur); Sindhi (spoken in Sindh province by emigrants); Northern (Thaḷi); Jhang; and Shahpuri.

A list of names in use at one or another time during the 20th century for Saraiki dialects and dialect groups is compiled in the table below. The dialect names are spelled in the standard Anglicized spelling. 'C' and 'ch' both resemble English 'ch'; 'c' represents an unaspirated sound, 'ch' an aspirated. A macron over a vowel indicates a long vowel.

Dialect group	Subdialect	Where spoken	Alternate names	Notes
Mūltānī		Multan, Bahawalpur, Muzaffargaṛh, Rahim Yar Khan Districts	Bahāwalpurī/Riyāsatī, both names in use in Bahawalpur District.	According to Masica, Bahāwalpurī and Riyāsatī are locally specific names for the Mūltānī dialect group, possibly specific dialects within the group. According to Shackle, they denote a distinct dialect group. Also according to Shackle, Bahawalpur District (i.e., within its 1976 boundaries) is split between Multani in the north and Bahawalpuri in the south, with the dialect of Bahawalpur city being of blend of these two.
	Ḍerāwāl	Dera Ghazi Khan District, Rajanpur District.		According to Masica, this use of the name Ḍerāwāl is to be distinguished from its use as an alternate name for a different dialect group (see following row).
Thaḷī		Jhang, Sargodha, Muzaffargarh Districts (Punjab Province); Mianwali, Bannu Districts (North-West Frontier Province)	Thaḷochṛi in Jhang District; Jaṭkī; Hindkō, Hindkī, Ḍerāwāl west of the Indus River, the last referring to the vicinity of Dera Ismail Khan	Named after the Thaḷ, a region bordered by the Indus River to the west and the Jhelum and Chenab Rivers to the east.
Jhangī		Jhang, Faisalabad, Gujrat, Gujranwala Districts	Cināwaṛī, Cinhāwaṛī (from the name of an area on the right bank of the Chenab River)	May actually be closer to the Punjabi language. Gujrat District is not to be confused with Gujarat State in India.
	Jāng(a)lī	Jangal Bar tract of Faisalabad District
	Kacchṛī	Kacchṛī is named for alluvial desert plain of Kacchī, SW of Jhang town
	Niswānī	North Jhang District	Subdialect or local name of Jhangī as spoken by a tribe, the Niswānā, as of 1919.
Sindhī Sarāikī		northern part of Sindh Province		Sirāikī dialect which has some features of the Sindhī language

Features

Saraiki language has the same consonant inventory as Sindhi. This inventory includes phonemically distinctive implosive_consonants, which make Sindhi and Saraiki unusual among the Indo-European languages (and not just among the Indo-Aryan languages).

Phonology

Vowels

Saraiki has three short vowels, seven long vowels and six nasal vowels.

Sounds

Many westerners while listening to a native speaker of Seraiki will hear the nasal sounds and will understand that,like Punjabi, Seraiki is a tonal language. This makes it difficult for many peolpe who dont speak Punjabi or Sindhi.

Consonants

		Bilabial	Labiodental	Dental	Alveolar	Retroflex	Palatal	Velar	Glottal
Stops and affricates	Voiceless	p pʰ		t̪ t̪ʰ	t tʰ		ʧ ʧʰ	k kʰ	ʔ
	Voiced	b bʰ		d̪ d̪ʰ	d dʰ		ʤ ʤʰ	ɡ ɡʰ
Implosives		ɓ			ɗ		ʄ	ɠ
Nasals		m mʰ			n nʰ	ɳ	ɲ	ŋ
Fricatives	Voiceless		f		s		ʃ	x	h
	Voiced		v		z		ʒ	ɣ
Trills					r rʰ			]]
Flaps						ɽ ɽʰ
Laterals					l lʰ
Semivowel							j

Writing system

There are two writing systems for Saraiki. One is a variant of the Arabic script, which is in vogue today. Very few Sairaiki speakers are literate in their own language, however, although some may be able to write other languages. However, the Hindus, especially the traders, wrote in a script called Laṇḍā, which was written from left to right. It is no longer used in present-day Pakistan, but there are still people of the generation that learned the script before the partition of India, when they had to flee, settle, and assimilate in different regions and linguistic territories of India and other places of the world. Some Indian Multanis also write in the Devanagari script.

See also

• Saraikistan
• Saraiki people

References

• Grierson, George A. 1919. Linguistic survey of India. vol. VIII, Part 1. Calcutta. Reprinted 1968 by Motilal Banarsidass, Delhi.
• Masica, Colin. 1991. The Indo-Aryan languages. Cambridge University Press.
• Pakistan. 1998. Population and Housing Census of Pakistan.
• Rahman, Tariq. 1997. Language and Ethnicity in Pakistan. Asian Survey, 1997 Sep., 37(9):833-839.
• Shackle, C. 1976. The Siraiki language of central Pakistan: a reference grammar. London:School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS).
• Shackle, C. 1977. Siraiki: A Language Movement in Pakistan. Modern Asian Studies, 11(3):379-403.

Further reading

• Ahsan, Wagha (1990). The Seraiki Language: Its Growth and Development. Islamabad: Dderawar Publications.
• Gardezi, Hassan N. (1996). Seraiki Language and its poetics: An Introduction. London: Sangat Publishers.

External links

• Wasaib.com Collection of articles and other resources on Seraiki language & culture
• Ethnologue report for language code:skr
• Western Punjabi (Seraiki) Alphabet with Gurmukhi equivalents
• Find Siraiki books [1]

• Phonemic Inventory of Seraiki Language and Acoustic Analysis of Voiced Implosives (PDF)
• Voice of Seraiki
• Youtube:Siraiki Songs [2]