Punjabi is among the most spoken languages in Britain and Canada. It has radio stations, television channels, newspapers, publishers and a music industry in both countries.
The second and third generations often speak it and do not read it. Gurmukhi literacy in the diaspora is maintained mainly through gurdwara Punjabi schools on weekends, and it is patchy.
The commercial Punjabi music industry now operates as much out of Toronto, Surrey and Birmingham as out of Ludhiana and Mohali, and the biggest Punjabi songs of the last decade have been made and financed abroad.
That means the language is being carried by people who left, using a script many of them cannot read, in an idiom that increasingly mixes English.
Punjabi is one of the largest languages in the world without a state that uses it as its primary official medium at every level. It survives on both sides of the border and abroad because people keep speaking it, not because any institution requires it.
The British Punjabi press began in the 1960s with weeklies serving the mill towns, and the satellite channels followed from the 1990s.
The Canadian Punjabi media is larger and more politically consequential, and Punjabi language debate there feeds directly back into Punjab.
None of it is archived. Fifty years of a community's own record of itself exists on paper in garages and on tape in station cupboards.