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Sindhi (/ ˈ s ɪ n d i /; Sindhi: سِنڌِي (Perso-Arabic), सिन्धी ) is an Indo-Aryan language spoken by about 30 million people in the Pakistani province of Sindh, where it has official status.
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- Characteristics
- Scripts
- Sindhi since 1947
Sindhi language, Indo-Aryan language spoken by about 23 million people in Pakistan, mostly living in the southeastern province of Sindh, where it has official status, and in the adjacent Las Bela district of Balochistan. In India, where Sindhi is one of the languages recognized by the constitution, there are some 2.5 million speakers, including bot...
As a result of the historically isolated situation of Sindh in the lower Indus valley, Sindhi is distinguished within Indo-Aryan by many linguistic features of its own. Its closest relative is Siraiki, with which it shares the four distinctive implosive consonants /b/, /d/, /g/, and /j/, which are pronounced with indrawn breath and contrast phonemically with the usual /b/, /d/, /g/, and /j/. Sindhi also preserves the old short final vowels lost in most other Indo-Aryan languages—e.g., gharu ‘house,’ ghara ‘houses,’ versus Siraiki (and Urdu) ghar ‘house, houses.’ Sindhi is further distinguished by numerous items of vocabulary and by many complexities in its grammatical system, such as a large number of irregular past participles—e.g., ditho ‘saw’ from disanu ‘to see,’ muo ‘died’ from maranu ‘to die’—and the use of suffixed pronouns, as in atha-mi ‘is mine,’ atha-si ‘is his.’
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Various indigenous scripts were formerly used by Hindu business communities to write Sindhi, but those are all now obsolete. The Muslim majority always favoured the use of the Arabic script with some necessary adaptations to record Sindhi sounds. Finally standardized in 1853 by the British colonial authorities, that Sindhi-Arabic script has since been in general use. Distinctively written in the printed naskhī form as opposed to the cursive nastaʿlīq used for Urdu, the Sindhi script has 52 letters (as against 35 in the Urdu script). They include not only letters with special combinations of dots to write the implosive consonants and the distinctive set of nasal sounds but also numerous other dotted letters to write most of the aspirated consonants, such as bh, dh, th, and so on, that appear in Urdu as combinations of the simple consonants with -h.
The distinctive appearance of the Sindhi-Arabic script is a matter of great cultural pride to most Sindhi speakers, whose cultural solidarity is reinforced by the universal appeal of the great symbolic figure of classical Sindhi literature, the Sufi poet Shah Abdul Latif of Bhit (1690–1752). Although attempts were made in India to encourage the writing of Sindhi in the national Devanagari script used for Hindi, the Sindhi-Arabic script continues to be generally current in both India and Pakistan.
The cultural homogeneity of Sindh that embraced both Hindu and Muslim speakers of Sindhi in the colonial period was severely disrupted by the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947. Most Hindu Sindhi speakers migrated to India, where they form a minority scattered among speakers of other languages. Their leading position in the urban society of Si...
Sindhi is an Indo-Aryan language spoken mainly in Pakistan, and also in India and Singapore. In Pakistan it is spoken in Sindh and Balochistan provinces, and in Hyderabad and Karachi, by about 31 million people (in 2017). Sindhi at a glance. Native name: سنڌي, सिन्धी, ਸਿੰਧੀ, 𑈩𑈭𑈴𑈝𑈮, 𑋝𑋡𑋟𑋐𑋢 [ˈsɪndi]
Sindhi is an Indo-Aryan language spoken by about 30 million people in the Pakistani province of Sindh, where it has official status. It is also spoken by a further 1.7 million people in India, where it is a scheduled language, without any state-level official status.
Sindhis (/ ˈ s ɪ n d iː z /; Sindhi: سنڌي (Perso-Arabic), सिन्धी , romanized: sindhī) are an Indo-Aryan ethnolinguistic group who speak the Sindhi language and are native to the Sindh province of Pakistan.
Sindhi ( سنڌي, Sindhī) is an Indo-Aryan language of the Sindh region of South Asia, which is a province of Pakistan. It is spoken by about 41 million people in Pakistan and 2 million in the Republic of India. [1] Dialects. Sindhi has many dialects like: [2] Uttaradi: spoken in Uttar north region of Sindh. Vicholi: spoken in central region of Sindh.
Sindhi is one of the major languages of Pakistan , spoken in the province of Sindh by approximately forty million people. It is one of the oldest language of the sub-continent with a rich culture, vast folklore and extensive literature. Linguistic Boundaries: Sindhi has extended its boundaries beyond the province of Sindh .
