Punjabi Language

             Punjab is a region straddling the border between India and Pakistan. Punjab has a long history and rich cultural heritage. The people of the Punjab are called Punjabis and they speak a language called Punjabi. Punjabi is an ancient language, but like Punjabi, started its literary career pretty late. The script is Gurmukhi based on Devanagri.Punjabi is spoken mostly in the states of Punjab both in India and Pakistan as well as in their Diasporas.It nearly resembles Hindi and Urudu and is spoken approximately by 88 million native speakers.It is the 11th most widely spoken languages of the world.Many ancient Sufi mystics and later Guru Nanak Dev ,the first Guru of Sikhism started their literary tradition in Punjabi.Punjabi 's vocabulary mainly comes from Sanskrit and Hindi and some words also come from Urdu ,Farsi . However it's dialects are influenced by no. of dialects such as Marwari , Sindhi ,Kashmiri . However it's standard dialect is Majhi spoken in Amritsar , Lahore Tarn- Taran and Gurdaspur.In India, Punjabi is written in the distinctive Gurumukhi script, which is particularly associated with the Sikhs. That script is a member of the Indic family of scripts, written from left to right, but in its organization it differs significantly from the Devanagari used to write Hindi. The Urdu script, written from right to left, is used for writing Punjabi in Pakistan, where it is nowadays often given the imitative name Shahmukhi. Punjabi is thus today one of the very few languages in the world to be written in two quite different and mutually unintelligible scripts.

                                            

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 Akshaya.P

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