Punjabi conversation runs on proverbs, akhaan, and on set phrases, and a speaker who cannot use them is understood but is not taken entirely seriously.
They are mostly agricultural, mostly unsentimental and often cruel. They are about weather, debt, in-laws, work, greed and the reliability of people.
A large body of them was collected in the colonial period, notably in the volumes by Captain Temple and in Punjabi collections since, and those collections are cleaned up. The working repertoire is coarser.
The same proverb often exists in Gurmukhi and Shahmukhi versions, identical in wording, on both sides of the border, which is one of the plainest demonstrations that the culture was not divided in 1947 even where the people were.
Proverbs about caste, about women and about particular communities are part of the repertoire and are used casually. A collection that leaves them out is not a collection of what Punjabis say.
This is oral literature in daily use by a hundred and forty million people and there is no comprehensive modern collection of it.
The akhaan are the working philosophy of the Punjabi countryside, compressed, rhythmic and usually agricultural in their imagery.
They are used to end an argument rather than to start one. A proverb produced at the right moment closes a discussion because there is nothing to say back to it.
The colonial collections recorded thousands of them and are the largest gathering that exists. No comprehensive modern collection with sources and variants has been made in either script.