Siraiki

Sarāikī (Perso-Arabic: سراییکی, Gurmukhi: ਸਰਾਇਕੀ, Devanagari: सराइकी), most commonly spelled Seraiki, also Siraiki, is a new standard written language of Pakistan belonging to the Indo-Aryan (Indic) languages.^[3] Saraiki is based on a group of vernacular dialects very similar to one another spoken in the southern half of Punjab Province and in adjacent northern parts of Sindh Province by over 14 million people, as well as by over 56,000 emigrés and their descendants in India.^[4]

Historically, these are unwritten dialects. They are similar to the core dialects of Punjabi, which are spoken to their northeast. The development of the standard language of Saraiki, a process which began after the founding of Pakistan in 1947, has been driven by a regionalist political movement.^[5]^[6] Since 1981, the national census of Pakistan has tabulated Saraiki among the nation's mother tongues.

Geographic distribution

The territory of the dialects identified as belonging to "Saraiki" is bounded by the Salt Range to the north (south of the national capital of Islamabad), to the south by Sindh Province, to the west by a line west of the Indus River and near that river, and to the east by a north-south line west of the border with India. In 1919, Grierson maintained that the dialects this area, west of Lahore and south of the Salt Range, constituted a dialect cluster, which he designated Southern Lahnda. Subsequent linguists have accepted the reality of this dialect cluster, even while rejecting other aspects of Grierson's scheme of classification.^[7] Saraiki is also spoken in Sindh Province north of an east-west line north of Sehwan; Sindhi is also spoken in that area.

Classification

Saraiki is part of a dialect continuum with Punjabi and Sindhi. Punjabi, Saraiki, and Sindhi are all members of the Indo-Aryan subdivision of the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European language family. By the strictly linguistic criterion of mutual intelligibility, Saraiki dialects form a common language with dialects uncontroversially recognized as Punjabi.^{citation needed} All the same, dialects of "Saraiki" are distinct from dialects of "Punjabi" in consonant inventory as well as in the structure of the verb.

The linguist George Abraham Grierson in his multivolume Linguistic Survey of India (1904-1928) considered the various dialects up to then called "western Punjabi", spoken north, west, and south of Lahore in what is now Pakistani Punjab, as constituting instead a distinct language from Punjabi. (The local dialect of Lahore is the Majhi dialect of Punjabi, which has long been the basis of standard literary Punjabi.) Grierson proposed to name this putative language "Lahnda". After Grierson's time, the name "Siraiki" started to be applied to Multani, Riyasati, Ḍerawal, and other dialects spoken in what is now southern Pakistani Punjab. The communities speaking these dialects historically did not constitute a single, self conscious ethnicity. Although Grierson noted that the name Siraiki is a Sindhi word meaning '[language] of the north' (sirō), Shackle asserts that this etymology is unverified and is merely the most plausible one advanced.^[8]

There is a tendency for some discussions of today's emerging Saraiki language to incorrectly include dialects or languages spoken farther north, in particular Hindko. This error is due to confusion between Saraiki and the larger category of Lahnda. While these others are considerably similar to Saraiki in linguistic structure, they are recognized by linguists as definitely distinct from "Saraiki" dialects, and their territories are not involved in the Saraiki regionalist movement.

Dialects of Saraiki

The historical inventory of names for the dialects now called Saraiki can be confusing. Several names partially overlap others in their scope of reference; e.g. "Hindki" and "Hindko" refer to various Saraiki and even non-Saraiki dialects in the Punjab Province and farther north within the country. One historical name for Saraiki, Jaṭki, means "of the Jaṭṭs", a north Indian 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. Several Saraiki dialects have multiple names corresponding to different regions or demographic groups. Provinces of Pakistan are divided into districts. Sources often describe the territory of a Saraiki dialect in terms of the districts where it is spoken. When consulting sources before 2000, it is important to know that several of these districts have been subdivided, some multiple times, since the founding of Pakistan. Until 2001, the territorial structure of Pakistan included a layer of Divisions between a Province and its Districts. The name dialect name Ḍerawali is used to refer to the local dialects of both Dera Ghazi Khan and Dera Ismail Khan, but Ḍerawali in the former is Multani and Ḍerawali in the latter is Thaḷi.^[9]^[10]

In the table below, the dialect names are spelled in the standard Anglicized spelling. 'C' and 'ch' both resemble English 'ch'; 'c' represents an unaspirated sound, 'ch' an aspirated. A macron over a vowel indicates a long vowel.

Number of speakers of Saraiki dialects

The national census of Pakistan included Saraiki for the first time in the census of 1981.^{citation needed} In that year, the percentage of respondents nationwide reporting Saraiki as their mother tongue 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.^[11] The next census of Pakistan will be conducted in October 2008.^{citation needed}

In India, the Multani dialect of Saraiki^[12] is spoken by 56,096 persons and the Bahawalpuri dialect is spoken by 11,873 individuals.^[4] Other dialects of Saraiki that are spoken by Indian Saraikis include Derawali^[13] Jafri, Siraiki Hindki, Thali, and Jatki.^[3]

Features

Saraiki dialects have the same consonant inventory as Sindhi^[14]. This inventory includes phonemically distinctive implosive_consonants, which makes Sindhi and Saraiki unusual among the Indo-European languages (and not just among the Indo-Aryan languages).

Phonology

Vowels

Consonants

Writing system

There are two writing systems for Saraiki. One is a variant of the Arabic script, which is in vogue today. Very few Sairaiki speakers are literate in their own language, however, although some may be able to write other languages. However, the Hindus, especially the traders, wrote in a script called Lahnda, which was written from left to right.^[15]^[2]^[16] It is no longer used in present-day Pakistan, but there are still people of the generation that learned the script before the partition of India, when they had to flee, settle, and assimilate in different regions and linguistic territories of India and other places of the world. Some Indian Multanis also write in the Devanagari script.^[17]^[2]^[18]

Variants in the Anglicized spelling

Starting in the 1960's, local social and political leaders adopted the name "Siraiki" (but not necessarily with 'i' when writing in English) and standardized the scripts (orthographies). Linguists specializing in the language have consistently used the 'i' spelling, but among nonlinguists there are three rival spellings, even in English language documents and newspapers produced within Pakistan: "Saraiki", "Siraiki", and "Seraiki", with the last perhaps the most frequent (all three spellings represent short vowel sounds). In the native script, the 'a' spelling (or rather, its native equivalent) is the standard. (This is manifested, as in the spelling in Gurmukhi and Devanagari scripts at the top of this article, by the lack of any vowel diacritic, as is typical of native Indo-Aryan orthographies, where no diacritics are used to indicate the vowel sound, short 'a', while diacritics are used to indicate any other vowel sound.)

Contents

Geographic distribution

Classification

Dialects of Saraiki

Number of speakers of Saraiki dialects

Features

Phonology

Vowels

Consonants

Writing system

Variants in the Anglicized spelling

See also

Notes

References

Further reading

External links