Saraiki dialect

Name

The present extent of the meaning of sirāikī 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 siro '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, a kingdom name in ancient India which was also mentioned in the Sanskrit epic Mahabharata.

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. An organization named Saraiki Academy was founded in Multan on 6 April 1962 and gave the name of universal application to the dialect. Currently, Saraiki is the spelling used in universities of Pakistan (the Islamia University of Bahawalpur, department of Saraiki established in 1989, Bahauddin Zakariya University, in Multan, department of Saraiki established in 2006, and Allama Iqbal Open University, in Islamabad, department of Pakistani languages established in 1998), and by the district governments of Bahawalpur and Multan, as well as by the federal institutions of the Government of Pakistan like Population Census Organization and Pakistan Broadcasting Corporation.

Classification and related languages

Saraiki is a member of the Indo-Aryan subdivision of the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European language family. Standard Punjabi and Saraiki (South Punjabi) are mutually intelligible.

In 1919, 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).

Dialects

The following dialects have been tentatively proposed for 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" – 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 arrivals from Afghanistan. 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. 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. Until 2001, the territorial structure of Pakistan included a layer of divisions between a province and its districts.

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. In one general colloquial sense, a language is a "developed" dialect: one that is standardised, has a written tradition and enjoys social prestige. As there are degrees of development, the boundary between a language and a dialect thus defined is not clear-cut, and there is a large middle ground where assignment is contestable.

There is a second meaning of these terms, in which the distinction is drawn on the basis of linguistic similarity. Though seemingly a "proper" linguistics sense of the terms, it is still problematic: methods that have been proposed for quantifying difference (for example, based on mutual intelligibility) have not been seriously applied in practice; and any relationship established in this framework is relative. Thus Multani is a "dialect" of Siraiki in the same way that Siraiki is a "dialect" of Lahnda, which is then a "dialect" of Punjabi, which in turn is a "dialect" of Indo-Aryan. In this sense both Siraiki and Standard Panjabi are "dialects" of a "Greater Punjabi" macrolanguage.

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

Saraiki is primarily spoken in the south-western part of the province of Punjab. 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 Western Punjabi.

Pakistan

Today, 20 million people from North Sindh, South Punjab, South Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Eastern Balochistan province speak Saraiki.

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.

India

As of 2001, Saraiki dialects are spoken by 68,000 people in India. According to the Indian national census of 2001, it is spoken in urban areas throughout northwest and north central India, mainly by the descendants of migrants from western Punjab after the independence of Pakistan in 1947. Some of these speakers went to Andhra Pradesh and settled there before the independence movement because of their pastoral and nomadic way of life, and these are Muslims. 56,000 persons report their dialect as Mūltānī and 12,000 individuals report their dialect as Bahāwalpurī. The dialects of Saraiki spoken in India are Jafri, Siraiki Hindki, Thali and Riasati (Bahawalpuri, Bhawalpuri, Reasati). Saraiki is spoken in Karnal, Faridabad, Ballabhgarh, Palwal, Rewari, Sirsa, Fatehabad, Hisar, Bhiwani, Panipat districts of Haryana, some areas of Delhi and the Ganganagar district, Jaipur, Hanumangarh and Bikaner districts of Rajasthan.

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 /ɪ ʊ ə/ tend to be shorter than the "peripheral" vowels /i ɛ a o u/. The central vowel /ə/ is more open and back than the corresponding vowel in neighbouring varieties. Vowel nasalisation is distinctive: /'ʈuɾẽ/ 'may you go' vs. /'ʈuɾe/ 'may he go'. Before /ɦ/, the contrast between /a/ and /ə/ is neutralised. There is a high number of vowel sequences, some of which can be analysed as diphthongs.

Consonants

Saraiki possesses a large inventory of consonants:

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 /tʃala/ 'custom' ∼ aspirated /tʃʰala/ 'blister' ∼ implosive /ʄala/ 'cobweb' ∼ voiced /dʒala/ 'niche' ∼ voiced aspirate /jʰəɠ/ 'foam'.

There are five contrasting places of articulation for the stops: velar, palatal, retroflex, dental and bilabial. The dentals / t tʰ d dʰ/ 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 /ᶑ/ is pronounced. The palatal stops are here somewhat arbitrarily represented with [tʃ] and [dʒ]. In casual speech some of the stops, especially /k/, /g/ and /dʒ/, are frequently rendered as fricatives – respectively [x], [ɣ] and [z].

Of the nasals, only /n/ and /m/ 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: /ŋ ɲ ɳ n m/. The retroflex ɳ is a realised as a true nasal only if adjacent to a retroflex stop, elsewhere it is a nasalised retroflex flap [ɽ̃]. The contrasts /ŋ/ ∼ /ŋɡ/, and /ɲ/ ∼ /ɲdʒ/ are weak; the single nasal is more common in southern varieties, and the nasal + stop cluster is prevalent in central dialects. Three nasals /ŋ n m/ have aspirated counterparts /ŋʰ nʰ mʰ/.

The realisation of the alveolar tap /ɾ/ varies with the phonetic environment. It is trilled if geminated to /ɾɾ/ and weakly trilled if preceded by /t/ or /d/. It contrasts with the retroflex flap /ɽ/ (/taɾ/ 'wire' ∼ /taɽ/ 'watching'), except in the variety spoken by Hindus. The fricatives /f v/ are labio-dental. The glottal fricative /ɦ/ is voiced and affects the voice quality of a preceding vowel.

Phonotactics and stress

There are no tones in Saraiki. All consonants except /h y ɳ ɽ/ can be geminated ("doubled"). Geminates occur only after stressed centralised vowels, and are phonetically realised much less markedly than in the rest of the Punjabi area.

A stressed syllable is distinguished primarily by its length: if the vowel is peripheral /i ɛ a o u/ then it is lengthened, and if it is a "centralised vowel" (/ɪ ʊ ə/) then the consonant following it is geminated. Stress normally falls on the first syllable of a word. The stress will, however, fall on the second syllable of a two-syllable word if the vowel in the first syllable is centralised, and the second syllable contains either a diphthong, or a peripheral vowel followed by a consonant, for example /dɪɾ'kʰan/ 'carpenter'. Three-syllable words are stressed on the second syllable if the first syllable contains a centralised vowel, and the second syllable has either a peripheral vowel, or a centralised vowel + geminate, for example /tʃʊ'həttəɾ/ 'seventy-four'. There are exceptions to these rules and they account for minimal pairs like /it'la/ 'informing' and /'itla/ 'so much'.

Implosives

The unusual for South Asia implosive consonants are found in Sindhi, possibly some Rajasthani dialects, and Saraiki, which has the following series: /ɓ ᶑ ʄ ɠ/.

The "palatal" /ʄ/ is denti-alveolar and laminal, articulated further forward than most other palatals.

The "retroflex" /ᶑ/ is articulated with the tip or the underside of the tongue, further forward in the mouth than the plain retroflex stops. It has been described as post-alveolar, pre-palatal or pre-retroflex. Bahl (1936, p. 30) reports that this sound is unique in Indo-Aryan and that speakers of Multani take pride in its distinctiveness. The plain voiced /ɖ/ and the implosive /ᶑ/ are mostly in complementary distribution although there are a few minimal pairs, like /ɖakʈəɾ/ 'doctor' ∼ /ᶑak/ 'mail'. The retroflex implosive alternates with the plain voiced dental stop /d/ in the genitive postposition/suffix /da/, which takes the form of /ᶑa/ when combined with 1st or 2nd person pronouns: /meᶑa/ 'my', /teᶑa/ 'your'.

A dental implosive (/ɗ̪/) is found in the northeastern Jhangi dialect, which is characterised by a lack of phonemic contrast between implosives and plain stops, and a preference for implosives even in words where Saraiki has a plain stop. The dental implosive in Jhangi is articulated with the tongue completely covering the upper teeth. It is not present in Saraiki, although Bahl (1936, p. 29) contends that it should be reconstructed for the earlier language. Its absence has been attributed to structural factors: the forward articulation of /ʄ/ and the lesser retroflexion of /ᶑ/.

Aspirated (breathy voiced) implosives occur word-initially, where they contrast with aspirated plain stops: /ɓʰɛ(h)/ 'sit' ~ /bʰɛ/ 'fear'. The aspiration is not phonemic; it is phonetically realised on the whole syllable, and results from an underlying /h/ that follows the vowel, thus [ɓʰɛh] is phonemically /ɓɛh/.

The historical origin of the Saraiki implosives has been on the whole the same as in Sindhi. Their source has generally been the older language's series of plain voiced stops, thus Sanskrit janayati > Saraiki ʄəɲən 'be born'. New plain voiced stops have in turn arisen out of certain consonants and consonant clusters (for example, yava > dʒao 'barley'), or have been introduced in loanwords from Sanskrit, Hindi, Persian or English (ɡərdən 'throat', bəs 'bus'). The following table illustrates some of the major developments:

Within South Asia, implosives were first described for Sindhi by Stake in 1855. Later authors have noted their existence in Multani and have variously called them "recursives" or "injectives", while Grierson incorrectly treated them as "double consonants".

Writing system

In the province of Punjab, Saraiki is written using the Arabic-derived Urdu alphabet with the addition of seven diacritically modified letters to represent the implosives and the extra nasals. In Sindh the Sindhi alphabet is used. The calligraphic styles used are Naskh and Nastaʿlīq.

Historically, traders or bookkeepers wrote in a script known as kiṛakkī or laṇḍā, although use of this script has been significantly reduced in recent times. Likewise, a script related to the Landa scripts family, known as Multani, was previously used to write Saraiki. A preliminary proposal to encode the Multani script in ISO/IEC 10646 was submitted in 2011. Saraiki Unicode has been approved in 2005. The Khojiki script has also been in use, whereas Devanagari and Gurmukhi are not employed anymore.

Here is an example of Saraiki poetry by Khwaja Ghulam Farid: Saraiki: اپڑیں ملک کوں آپ وسا توں ۔ پٹ انگریزی تھانے

Saraiki in academia

Department of Saraiki, Islamia University, Bahawalpur was established in 1989 and Department of Saraiki, Bahauddin Zakariya University, Multan was established in 2006. Saraiki is taught as subject in schools and colleges at higher secondary, intermediate and degree level. Allama Iqbal open university Islamabad, and Al-Khair university Bhimbir have their Pakistani Linguistics Departments. They are offering M.Phil. and Ph.D in Saraiki. Associated Press of Pakistan has launched its site in Saraiki also.

Arts and literature

Khawaja Ghulam Farid (1845–1901; his famous collection is Deewan-e-Farid) and Sachal Sar Mast (1739–1829) are the most celebrated Sufi poets in Saraiki and their poems known as Kafi are still famous.

Shakir Shujabadi (Kalam-e-Shakir, Khuda Janey, Shakir Diyan Ghazlan, Peelay Patr, Munafqan Tu Khuda Bachaway, and Shakir De Dohray are his famous books) is a very well recognized modern poet.

Famous singers who have performed in Saraiki include Attaullah Khan Essa Khailwi, Pathanay Khan, Abida Parveen, Ustad Muhammad Juman, Mansoor Malangi, Talib Hussain Dard, Kamal Mahsud, and The Sketches. Many modern Pakistan singers such as Hadiqa Kiyani and Ali Zafar have also sung Saraiki folk songs.

Television channels

Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani on Monday said southern Punjab is rich in cultural heritage which needs to be promoted for next generations. In a message on the launch of Saraiki channel by Pakistan Television (PTV) in Multan, Prime Minister Gilani said the step would help promote the rich heritage of 'Saraiki Belt'.

Radio

These are not dedicated Saraiki channels but play most programmes in Saraiki.