Interesting facts about the language

Punjabi (also: Panjabi, pronounced Panjabi) is spoken as a native language by more than 100 million people. Of these, almost 70 million live in Pakistan and 25 million in India. There are also larger Punjabi-speaking minorities in Australia, Great Britain, Canada, the Philippines, Saudi Arabia, the USA, and the United Arab Emirates. Punjabi is an official language only in India, in the state of Punjab. In Pakistan, however, English and Urdu are the official languages. The language has a variety of dialects, which can be grouped into two main dialects, Eastern and Western Punjabi. Punjabi is written in Pakistan using the Shahmukhi script (which means "from the mouth of kings"), which is a modified version of the Persian Nashdiq script. Written records in the Shahmukhi script are rare, however, because Punjabi is primarily an oral colloquial language in Pakistan, while English or Urdu are used as the written languages. In India, Punjabi is predominantly written in the Gurmukhi script ("from the mouth of the Gurus"). Indian Hindus, who wish to distinguish themselves from the Sikhs who write in Gurmukhi, sometimes use the Devanagari script.

Depending on its regional usage, the language has integrated a multitude of foreign loanwords over time, the majority of which come from Urdu, Sanskrit, Arabic, and Persian. Due to the worldwide migration of Punjabi speakers, a "Diaspora Punjabi" has also developed, into which primarily English words have flowed. Punjabi is a so-called tonal language, in which pitch can be decisive for the meaning of a word. Punjabi belongs to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-Iranian languages, which in turn form a subgroup of the Indo-Germanic languages. Other Indo-Aryan languages include Hindi, Urdu, and Bengali.