The dialects

Majhi, spoken in Amritsar, Tarn Taran, Gurdaspur and across the line in Lahore and Sheikhupura, is the basis of standard written Punjabi. What is taught as Punjabi is Majhi.

Malwai is spoken south of the Sutlej, in Ludhiana, Bathinda, Sangrur and the rest of the Malwa, and is the dialect of most Punjabi popular music.

Doabi is spoken between the Beas and the Sutlej, in Jalandhar and Hoshiarpur, and is the dialect of most of the Britain and Canada diaspora.

Powadhi is spoken around Rupnagar, Mohali, Fatehgarh Sahib and into Haryana. Pothohari, Hindko and the western dialects are now almost entirely in Pakistan.

The differences are of vocabulary, of verb endings and of intonation, and a Punjabi can usually place another Punjabi's district within a sentence or two.

Nobody has produced a modern dialect atlas of Punjabi. The last serious survey work on Punjabi dialects across the whole language area was done before 1947 and the language area has been divided ever since.

Majhi, Malwai, Doabi and Powadhi on this side, and Pothohari, Saraiki, Hindko, Multani and the bar dialects on the other, cover a range wide enough that the ends are barely mutually intelligible.

The written standard is Majhi, which means most Punjabi speakers in India write a dialect that is not the one they speak.

The dialect atlas of the region does not exist. Nobody has mapped the isoglosses across the two countries and no institution on either side is doing it.

What we don't know

  • A modern dialect atlas. There is none.

Where to check this

Named but not linked. These are real, findable documents. This project has not consulted them for this page.

  • Linguistic Survey of India, Punjabi volumes.
  • Modern dialect studies, which are partial.

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.