Punjabi has somewhere between 125 and 150 million speakers, which makes it around the tenth or eleventh most spoken language in the world. Most of them are in Pakistan.
It is tonal, which is unusual among Indo-Aryan languages and is the feature that most surprises linguists coming to it. The tones arose from the loss of voiced aspirate consonants and they are not marked in either script.
It is written in Gurmukhi in India and Shahmukhi, a Perso-Arabic script, in Pakistan. The two are mutually unreadable. Machine transliteration developed at Punjabi University Patiala is the main bridge.
In Indian Punjab it is the official language and the medium of instruction. In Pakistani Punjab, where the great majority of speakers live, it is not the medium of instruction at any level and has no daily newspaper of significance. Urdu occupies the space.
Its major dialects are Majhi, on which the written standard is based, Malwai, Doabi, Powadhi, Pothohari, and depending on the classification, Saraiki and Hindko.
A language of a hundred and forty million people, with a thousand years of literature, is not taught to most of the children who speak it.
It is an Indo-Aryan language descended from the Prakrits of this region, tonal, written in Gurmukhi on one side and Shahmukhi on the other.
By speakers it is among the ten or twelve largest languages in the world. By institutional support it is far below languages with a fraction of its speakers.
Its literature runs continuously from Baba Farid Ji in the twelfth century, which makes it one of the older continuous literary traditions in South Asia and one of the least translated.