Also Known As: Reasati,Siraiki,Multani,Riasiti,Bahawalpuri,Southern Panjabi,Riasati,Mutani,Seraiki,Saraiki
Description:
Sarāikī (Perso-Arabic: سرائیکی, Gurmukhi: ਸਰਾਇਕੀ, Devanagari: सराइकी), sometimes spelled Siraiki and Seraiki, is a language of Pakistan belonging to the Indo-Aryan branch of Indo-European. It is part of the Lahnda macrolanguage that also includes Western Panjabi. Saraiki itself has a group of dialects.
It is spoken in the southern half of Punjab Province and in adjacent parts of Sindh, Balochistan and NWFP Provinces by nearly 14 million people (1998 Population and Housing Census, Pakistan), as well as by nearly 70,000 emigrants and their descendants in India (Census of India, 2001),, 30,000 in the United Kingdom and a minority in Afghanistan.
However the development of the standard language of Saraiki distinguished from Western Panjabi, 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.
Saraiki is native to what is now the southwestern half of Punjab Province in Pakistan. In 1919, Grierson maintained that the dialects this area constituted a dialect cluster, which he designated "Southern Lahnda" within a putative..... full article at Wikipedia |