Punjab is a broad panorama of beauty and splendor. Its language is an asset, which is gaining huge popularity among people throughout the country. Punjabi is the official language of the state, which bears a lot of similarity with Hindi. It is the eleventh most popular language in the world. Punjabi has its origin in the eleventh century and is the successor of Sauraseni Prakrit. It is an ancient language that has an Indo-European origin. It is very widely spoken by the people in Punjab. However, the people of West Punjab speak more Hindi than Punjabi, whereas the case is reverse in East Punjab.
The script used in Punjabi language is Gurmukhi, which is based on Devanagri. It is both a fusion and a tonal language. It is a fusion language because several morphemes (the smallest linguistic unit which has semantic meaning) fuse together to form the language. It owes its tonal aspect to the fact that words here are distinguished by the tones. Modern Punjabi borrows extensively from other languages, like Hindi, Persian, Urdu and English. Recently Punjabi has traversed to different destinations across the world, where it gets molded as per the local vocabulary.
Surprisingly, Punjabi language has several dialects, which have emerged area-wise, depending on the exact region where the language is in use. Some of the important dialects are Bhattianj, Malwai, Pahari, Doabi, Kangri, Hindko, Pothowari, Shahpuri, Rachnavi, Majhi, Thali, Thalochri, Chakwali, and Ghebi. Hindi is a very popular language in the state, which almost every one can speak and understand fluently. Even English is a very familiar language. So, you will have little difficulty in conversing with the Punjabis. Besides, they are very supportive and helpful, so even if anything is unintelligible to them, they can still manage to understand and help you out.
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