Punjabi: An Indo-Aryan Language of the Sikh Scriptures

Punjabi belongs to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European family, developed from Sanskrit-derived Prakrit and Apabhramsha vernaculars of the Punjab region straddling modern India and Pakistan, and is unusual among major Indo-Aryan languages for being a genuinely tonal language, a feature that developed through the historical loss of certain consonant sounds whose effect shifted onto pitch instead. Punjabi is written in two distinct scripts depending on religion and national border, Gurmukhi, developed specifically for Sikh scriptural use and associated historically with the second Sikh Guru, Guru Angad, in the sixteenth century, used predominantly by Sikhs and in Indian Punjab, and Shahmukhi, a Perso-Arabic-based script used by Punjabi Muslims in Pakistani Punjab, a script divide that mirrors the wider Hindi-Urdu split and reflects how religious community rather than spoken dialect has often determined which writing system a South Asian language community adopts.

Punjabi's Gurmukhi script and its associated literary tradition developed specifically to record and transmit Sikh scripture in a form distinct from the Sanskrit-based Devanagari used for Hindu religious texts. Gurmukhi literally means from the mouth of the Guru, a name reflecting the script's foundational association with the Sikh Gurus themselves rather than a neutral technical label, reinforcing its status within Sikhism as considerably more than a mere writing system.