Siraiki language

Siraiki language, Indo-Aryan language spoken in Pakistan. The Siraiki-speaking region spreads across the southwestern districts of Punjab province, extending into adjacent regions of the neighbouring provinces of Sindh, Balochistan, and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. There were probably at least 20 million speakers in the early 21st century, but it is hardly possible to establish accurate numbers, given official reluctance to compile and publish the relevant statistics. This may be attributed to the sensitivity of language issues in Pakistan, notably including the growing pressure for official recognition of Siraiki as a language distinct from Punjabi, and the consequent demand for the separation of the main Siraiki-speaking region from Punjab province. These claims are in turn often strongly opposed by those who regard Siraiki as no more than a dialect of Punjabi, thus possessing no right to fuller political recognition.

Siraiki, Punjabi, and Sindhi

As is generally the case with such disputes about language identity, the arguments are based only partly on purely linguistic factors, since they also relate to broader historical and cultural understandings. So although the linguistic frontier is very well defined to the west of the Siraiki region, where it marks the dividing line between the vast Indo-Aryan speech area and the territory of the Iranian languages Pashto and Balochi, there is no such clear boundary to the east with Punjabi. In most other parts of the Indo-Aryan area, the continuum of related dialects has been overlaid in the modern period by carefully defined standard languages, but this process has not taken place in Punjab, where the British policy of using Urdu instead of any form of local speech as the official language has been continued in Pakistan.

As might be expected from its geographical position, Siraiki is linguistically intermediate between Sindhi and Punjabi, although generally somewhat closer to the latter in vocabulary. Although there is consequently quite a high degree of mutual comprehensibility between Siraiki and Punjabi, Siraiki shares several important grammatical features with Sindhi and was separately classified in Sir George Grierson’s influential Linguistic Survey of India (1903–28) with the latter. In common with Sindhi, Siraiki possesses the four distinctive implosive consonants /b/, /d/, /g/, and /j/, which are pronounced with indrawn breath and contrast phonemically with the usual /b/, /d/, /g/, and /j/; e.g., Siraiki bas ‘enough!’ and bas ‘bus’ are both pronounced bas in Punjabi. Siraiki also keeps the usual Indo-Aryan aspirates, which are distinctively realized as tones in Punjabi; e.g., Siraiki ghora ‘horse’ is like Sindhi ghoro and Urdu ghora but unlike Punjabi k’òra.

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Languages & Alphabets

Script

In Sindh, where in the northern districts Siraiki is widely spoken bilingually with Sindhi, Siraiki is usually written in the Sindhi script, which has all the needed special letters. But in Punjab, where the modern Siraiki movement is centred, the Urdu script is used with the addition of specially modified letters to write the implosives and other distinctive Siraiki sounds. Great importance is attached to the proper pronunciation and writing of these sounds as major shibboleths symbolizing the separate identity of Siraiki.

The Siraiki movement

The modern Siraiki movement, which barely predates the 1960s, has always been importantly fueled by a keen sense of the marginal status of the region in terms of its economic development and political influence when compared with the powerful position of Punjab’s eastern districts, with their rich resources, around the provincial capital of Lahore. The movement’s most significant early success was to achieve a general acceptance of the word Siraiki—originally a Sindhi term meaning “the language of the north (siro)”—as a common label for all the local varieties of speech in southwestern Punjab and the neighbouring districts. Itself creating a powerful sense of regional identity, the name has successfully replaced the various local names, such as Multani, the language of Multan, historically the principal city of the region, or Riyasati, the language of the formerly powerful princely state (riyasat) of Bahawalpur.

At the same time, the cultural identity of Siraiki has been underpinned by appealing to its distinctive literary heritage. Although the language of the earliest poets, such as Shaikh Farid Shakarganj (1175–1266), is open to claims from either Siraiki or Punjabi speakers, there is a substantially distinct Siraiki poetic tradition from more-recent times, including a vigorous production of poetry in northern Sindh in the 18th century. But the great cultural symbol of Siraiki identity is the magnificent poetry of the Bahawalpuri saint-poet Khwaja Ghulam Farid (1845–1901), which celebrates the scenery of the local deserts with an abundance of purely local vocabulary and continues to be a major inspiration of modern Siraiki literature.