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Is Punjabi a mere dialect of Hindi?

LOLZZZ. You dont know urduuu. Omgg!!!!!!! Ihad thought u can speak and understand quite good urdu. Oh my bad!!!

Ok i was saying that my avatar , i had recently changed it and i want to keep it for sometime ,i hope u wont mind

I said "derelict" which is not the same as nothing at all. I got the gist of what you said after going back and forth on the sentance. I can wade through but don't feel comfortable. I have knocked off 1,100 posts and find one in Urdu .....
 
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Your dalit Christians are the remnants of our ancestors.

Yes, it had already occured to me. However I suspect that lot of them moved from present day India west into what is now Pakistan with the British.

@save_ghenda Your correct there because those Dalit Christians would fit in Bihar like Polar bear fits into glacier ...
 
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Yes, it had already occured to me. However I suspect that lot of them moved from present day India west into what is now Pakistan with the British.
OK..I can show you even the common punjabies who look south Indian..anyway we are digressing..leave it
 
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In the past there was more divergence, more heterogenity then now simply because of limitation of travel. 200 miles away would be like 2,000 miles away.

So Prakrit means in this context 'dialect'? If so why not use the word dialect? This goes to my earlier suspicion that this was attempt at creating homogenity when there was'nt any.

It is like this. a, b, c, d, e, f, languages. However if I want to create uniformity in what appears as a heterogenous group if I call them Prakrit a, Prakrit b, Prakrit c, I am in effect imposing on them uniformiy and making them appear homogenous.
first clear ur mind which is full of prejudice ! here are some NonWiki sources hope it may help.

Prakrit languages | Britannica.com

Pali and the Prakrits | Asian Languages & Literature | University of Washington

read slowly and try to understand
 
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I said "derelict" which is not the same as nothing at all. I got the gist of what you said after going back and forth on the sentance. I can wade through but don't feel comfortable. I have knocked off 1,100 posts and find one in Urdu .....
Thatss a shock for me really. Anyways, no worries we will teach u urdu here lolzzz
 
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Thatss a shock for me really. Anyways, no worries we will teach u urdu here lolzzz

You know your making me feel more uncomfortable. I have a complex about this ...

@punit I would not quite characterize it as "prejudice" more along the lines of holding a certain perspective ....
 
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You know your making me feel more uncomfortable. I have a complex about this ...
Complex as in ,u feel bad that u dont know.

Oh well dont think that way. U can learn lil bit of it from the ppl on this forum.
 
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Norweigian, Swedish are rather similar but nevertheless differant languages. Polish, Slovakian and even Russian are similar ( I once had a occasion to talk to a interpreter who was helping me to communicate with Slovak Gypsies and I found out she was Polish -rather surprised I asked how she also could speak Slovak. Her reply was Slovak/Polish are Slav languages that are so close that both can be understood although there are of course differances. On that scale Serbian, Russian, Ukranian are also similar although the divergence increases further east you go. Most languages will have similarties. At what point you decide to call then unique is purely subjective and mostly informed by politics so your not going to get a objective answer.

Where there is external political push to create uniformity then Punjabi can be press ganged into the "Hindi" umbrella. Using the European benchmark Punjabi is a separate language. As regards to whether it is taught officially in Pakistan I believe it is not despite being the language of 65% of the population. however non of the native languages of the provinces that make Pakistan, Pashto, Punjabi, Baloch or Sindhi are taught at schools.

I believe this was a terrible mistake as Urdu was alien to most of the population. However because in Pakistan's formative years the Urdu community was dominant group Urdu was foisted on everybody and local languages were ignored unlike in India where everybody got equal chance with each stare kkepings it's language. Pakistan made a mistake but that is another story.

Just a lay man question--

Does any of these native languages have their own script?

I remember my room mate who was from Karachi used to read Punjabi novels but was written in Urdu script.
 
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Dont fix if aint broken. With so many problems at hand with reference to education system, you are proposing Pushto or Persian as Pakistan's national language. In my view all languages should be sacked for good and English be adapted as a single language for the purposes of education and office work. People can adhere to their mother tongues but these languages have no place in a society where English has become lingua franca.

Interestingly enough, Persian was the lingua-franca cum official language of modern day Pakistan before urdu. Even Punjabi nationalist Sikh empire used Persian for administration and record keeping.

As for Pashto; no thanks.

A bit off topic - I had read that there is actually a Dravidian language named Brahui which is spoken only in Pakistan. I found this quite amazing - as obviously Pakistan is far away from the Vindhyas. Any member here speak it?

The language the man is singing in is Brahvi:

Please do not make a mountain out of a molehill. You have extreme views on this issue and you are misinforming others. You are implying as if people are prosecuted for speaking in their native languages, and as if the native languages are all but dead and only because of Urdu. What undue favor are you talking about? Until now, after 70+ years, Urdu is not adopted as an official language. What advantage a person would get by speaking Urdu? Nobody stopped the provinces from teaching their local languages in the Schools. In-fact in Sindh, Sindhi is already compulsory in Schools and Urdu speaking community, which you hate to the core of your heart, accepted it. In my previous post I mentioned to you that more than one languages are spoken in each province and it would be a logistical nightmare to make everybody learn every language. Needless to say that it would consume lots of time of a student that could have been spent on studying other more relevant subjects. Quid-e-Azam and his companions were not idiots (or any less smarter than you) when they went for a single language (that was supported by all ethnicities except Bengalis) that had the capacity to unite a nation.

When a large number of dialects are spoken in a region, the official language followed is usually the prestige dialect. Every language of Pakistan has a prestige dialect. The prestige dialect of Punjabi is spoken in Gujranwala, if I'm not mistaken. The one of Potohari is spoken in Gujar Khan .The one of Seraiki is spoken in Multan etc etc. But yes, urdu as a lingua franca has done good for the federation. We're already quite divided among each other. If there was a language barrier between us all, we would have balkanized by now.

Personally I don't mind urdu as a lingua franca, because it has elements of Persian along with, obviously, Indo-Aryan, so it's easy to learn for all the ethnic groups of Pakistan. The only thing I dislike are some urdu bigots. Like some urdu speakers look down upon Lahoris for they have added a few Punjabi words to their common urdu. In Islamabad, Potohari influences have entered the local urdu variant.
 
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Interestingly enough, Persian was the lingua-franca cum official language of modern day Pakistan before urdu. Even Punjabi nationalist Sikh empire used Persian for administration and record keeping.

As for Pashto; no thanks.



The language the man is singing in is Brahvi:



When a large number of dialects are spoken in a region, the official language followed is usually the prestige dialect. Every language of Pakistan has a prestige dialect. The prestige dialect of Punjabi is spoken in Gujranwala, if I'm not mistaken. The one of Potohari is spoken in Gujar Khan .The one of Seraiki is spoken in Multan etc etc. But yes, urdu as a lingua franca has done good for the federation. We're already quite divided among each other. If there was a language barrier between us all, we would have balkanized by now.

Personally I don't mind urdu as a lingua franca, because it has elements of Persian along with, obviously, Indo-Aryan, so it's easy to learn for all the ethnic groups of Pakistan. The only thing I dislike are some urdu bigots. Like some urdu speakers look down upon Lahoris for they have added a few Punjabi words to their common urdu. In Islamabad, Potohari influences have entered the local urdu variant.
Such bigots exist in every community and they are best ignored. Fact of the matter is, no single ethnicity has helped in establishing Urdu more than Punjabis and from 1900 onwards. Who literate person can forget or ignore the contribution of Sheikh Abdul Qadir, Allama Iqbal etc. I have seen a time when in Karachi, supposedly cradel of Urdu in Pakistan, the sign boards would read 'barbar shop' or 'hair saloon' but in Lahore, the boards would read 'zulf tarash'.
 
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It's not a dialect of Hindi. Maybe in the past both languages had a common ancestor language, maybe prakrit, that is why speakers of both languages can understand each other
 
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