Whether Punjabi survives

Punjabi has around 150 million speakers and is not endangered by any standard measure. It also has structural weaknesses that most languages of its size do not.

It is not the medium of instruction in the province where most of its speakers live. It has no significant daily press in Shahmukhi. Its scholarly and technical vocabulary is developed and unused. Its two scripts are mutually unreadable and the transliteration that bridges them is a volunteer project.

In Indian Punjab it is official and compulsory and is losing ground in the private schools to English. In the diaspora it survives as a spoken language for two or three generations and then thins.

What keeps it alive is the music, which is enormous and commercially successful and is the main reason young Punjabis anywhere still use the language for something they chose.

A language survives on the number of things people want to do in it. Punjabi's list is shorter than it was and the music is doing most of the work.

Anything that adds to that list, a book, a film, a website, a recording of a grandmother, is worth more than any resolution about official status.

The number of speakers is very large and rising with the population. That is not what is at risk.

What is at risk is the domains: the school, the office, the court, the science, the internet. A language that keeps the home and loses everything else follows a known trajectory.

On the Pakistani side the loss is further along, because the language has no place in the education system at all. On the Indian side it has a place and a shrinking share of the students in it.

What we don't know

  • Punjabi literacy rates, which neither country reports separately from speaker numbers.

Where to check this

  1. Census language data for both countries. Census of India 2011 - Punjab district census handbooks ↗
  2. UNESCO language vitality criteria. UNESCO World Heritage and Intangible Heritage lists ↗

This page has not yet been read through by the editor. Treat it with more caution than the rest.

How this page was written. The text is compiled from the standard published histories and reference works, not from a document held in hand. Nobody from this project has visited the place or read the archive. The list above is where a reader can go to check it, not a record of what was consulted line by line. Dates and figures are the received account. If you hold something better, write in and it will be corrected.

This is one of 62 accounts in What the Voice Carried, the chapter of this site covering the poetry, the music and the oral tradition.