Sharif Kunjahi was born at Kunjah in Gujrat district in 1914 and spent his life arguing for Punjabi as a language of literature and education in a Pakistan that had decided otherwise.
He taught Punjabi at Punjab University Lahore when there was barely a department to teach it in, and he was central to establishing Punjabi as a university subject there.
He translated the Qur'an into Punjabi, which had not been done in Shahmukhi in a modern idiom, and translated Iqbal's Persian work into Punjabi.
His own poetry brought colloquial Punjabi speech into written verse, in a register that had been treated as unliterary.
The position he held for seventy years, that a hundred million people should be educated in their own language, has still not been conceded in Pakistani Punjab.
He argued in print, early and for a long time, that Punjabi in Pakistan should be a medium of education and not only a language of the home, and he made that argument from inside a university system that taught in Urdu and English.
Punjabi versions of the Qur'an existed in Gurmukhi and in oral commentary. A printed Shahmukhi text for Pakistani Punjabi readers did not, and that is the gap his translation filled.
He edited classical Punjabi poets and worked on the Punjabi dictionary project at Lahore. Most of the institutional infrastructure Punjabi has in Pakistan now was built by him and a small number of contemporaries.