Concept
Saraiki language
Related concepts (27)
South Asia
South Asia is the southern subregion of Asia, which is defined in both geographical and ethnic-cultural terms. As commonly conceptualised, South Asia consists of the countries predominantly Afghanistan Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, Topographically, it is dominated by the Indian subcontinent and defined largely by the Indian Ocean in the south, and the Himalayas, Karakoram, and Pamir mountains in the north. The Amu Darya, which rises north of the Hindu Kush, forms a part of the northwestern border.
Arabic script
The Arabic script is the writing system used for Arabic and several other languages of Asia and Africa. It is the second-most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world (after the Latin alphabet), the second-most widely used writing system in the world by number of countries using it or a script directly derived from it, and the third-most by number of users (after the Latin and Chinese scripts). The script was first used to write texts in Arabic, most notably the Quran, the holy book of Islam.
Urdu alphabet
The Urdu alphabet (), is the right-to-left alphabet used for Urdu. It is a modification of the Persian script, which is itself a derivative of the Arabic script. It is one of the official scripts of the Indian Republic. The Urdu alphabet has up to 39 or 40 distinct letters with no distinct letter cases and is typically written in the calligraphic Nastaʿlīq script, whereas Arabic is more commonly written in the Naskh style.
Hindko
Hindko (, romanized: Hindko, ˈɦɪnd̪koː) is a cover term for a diverse group of Lahnda dialects spoken by several million people of various ethnic backgrounds in several areas in northwestern Pakistan, primarily in the provinces of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and northwestern regions of Punjab. There is a nascent language movement, and in recent decades Hindko-speaking intellectuals have started promoting the view of Hindko as a separate language.
Sikh Empire
The Sikh Empire was a regional power based in the Punjab region of the Indian subcontinent. It existed from 1799, when Maharaja Ranjit Singh captured Lahore, to 1849, when it was defeated and conquered by the British East India Company in the Second Anglo-Sikh War. It was forged on the foundations of the Khalsa from a collection of autonomous misls. At its peak in the 19th century, the empire extended from Gilgit and Tibet in the north to the deserts of Sindh in the south and from the Khyber Pass in the west to the Sutlej in the east as far as Oudh.
Shahmukhi
Shahmukhi (, ਸ਼ਾਹਮੁਖੀ) is an Abjad developed from the Perso-Arabic alphabet script, used for the Punjabi language. It came into use in Punjabi Sufi literature, from the 12th century and onwards. It is generally written in the Nastaʿlīq calligraphic hand, which is also used for Urdu. Shahmukhi script is the standard script in Pakistani Punjab used for Punjabi. Perso-Arabic is one of two scripts used for Punjabi, the other being Gurmukhi used in the Indian Punjab. Shahmukhi is written from right to left, while Gurmukhi is written from left to right.
Punjabis
The Punjabis (Punjabi: ; ਪੰਜਾਬੀ ; romanised as Panjābī), are an Indo-Aryan ethnolinguistic group associated with the Punjab region, comprising areas of eastern Pakistan and northwestern India. They generally speak Standard Punjabi or various Punjabi dialects on both sides. The ethnonym is derived from the term Punjab (Five rivers) in Persian to describe the geographic region of the northwestern part of the Indian subcontinent, where five rivers Beas, Chenab, Jhelum, Ravi, and Sutlej merge into the Indus River, in addition of the now-vanished Ghaggar.
Nasal vowel
A nasal vowel is a vowel that is produced with a lowering of the soft palate (or velum) so that the air flow escapes through the nose and the mouth simultaneously, as in the French vowel /ɑ̃/ (Fr-en.ogg) or Amoy [ɛ̃]. By contrast, oral vowels are produced without nasalization. Nasalized vowels are vowels under the influence of neighbouring sounds. For instance, the [æ] of the word hand is affected by the following nasal consonant.
Languages of Pakistan
Pakistan is a multilingual country with dozens of languages spoken as first languages. The majority of Pakistan's languages belong to the Indo-Iranian group of the Indo-European language family. Urdu is the national language and the lingua franca of Pakistan, and while sharing official status with English, it is the preferred and dominant language used for inter-communication between different ethnic groups. Numerous regional languages are spoken as first languages by Pakistan's various ethnolinguistic groups.
Rajasthani languages
Rajasthani (Devanagari: राजस्थानी) languages is a group of Indo-Aryan languages and dialects spoken primarily in the state of Rajasthan and adjacent areas of Haryana, Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh in India. There are also speakers in the Pakistani provinces of Punjab and Sindh. Rajasthani is also spoken to a lesser extent in Nepal where it is spoken by 25,394 people according to the 2011 Census of Nepal. The term Rajasthani is also used to refer to a literary language mostly based on Marwari, which is being promoted as a standard language for the state of Rajasthan.