Alahuniyan are the mourning songs sung by women at a death in Punjab: a formal, sung lament, performed in company, in which the dead person is addressed and their qualities listed.
The performance was structured. Women of the household and of the village gathered, sat, and lamented in a form with its own metre, sometimes with a professional mourner leading.
Guru Nanak Dev Ji composed hymns in the Alahunian form, in raga Wadhans, using the structure of the mourning song and turning it toward acceptance rather than grief. They are sung at Sikh funerals.
That is a characteristic move: take the existing folk form and use it, rather than replace it. The same is done with the vaar, the ghorian, the suhag and the Barah Maha.
The Sikh reform movements discouraged the loud lament as such, and Alahuniyan as village practice has largely stopped in Sikh households while the scriptural composition of the same name is recited at every funeral.
The folk form is nearly gone and its name survives in the scripture that replaced it.
The professional mourner was paid and was usually from one of the service communities, so the practice was an economic arrangement as well as a rite, and it ended partly because that arrangement did.
Guru Nanak Sahib Ji composed alahuniyan in the same form, using it to say something different about death, which is the pattern of the volume's relationship with folk forms.
The practice has declined and the reform movements argued against the public wailing that went with it. In some villages the form survives and in most it does not.