Sindhi language

Sindhi (/ˈsɪndi/ SIN-dee; Sindhi: سِنڌِي‎ (Perso-Arabic))is an Indo-Aryan language spoken by more than 30 million people in the Pakistani province of Sindh, where it has official status, as well as by 1.7 million people in India, where it is a scheduled language without state-level official status. Sindhi is primarily written in the Perso-Arabic script in Pakistan, while in India, both the Perso-Arabic script and Devanagari are used.

Sindhi is a Northwestern Indo-Aryan language, and thus related to, but not mutually intelligible with, Saraiki and Punjabi. Sindhi has several regional dialects.

The earliest written evidence of modern Sindhi as a language can be found in a translation of the Qur’an into Sindhi dating back to 883 AD. Sindhi was one of the first Indo-Aryan languages to encounter influence from Persian and Arabic following the Umayyad conquest in 712 AD. A substantial body of Sindhi literature developed during the Medieval period, the most famous of which is the religious and mystic poetry of Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai from the 18th century. Modern Sindhi was promoted under British rule beginning in 1843, which led to the current status of the language in independent Pakistan after 1947.

Sindhi is an inflected language, with five cases for noun, three for personal pronoun, four for third-person pronoun; eleven case markers; two genders (masculine, feminine); and two numbers (singular, plural). The base of its vocabulary is derived from Sanskrit in the form of Prakrit and Apabhraṃśa, while a significant portion of its high-register speech is derived from Persian and Arabic, along with a number of recent loanwords borrowed from English; and to a lesser extent from Portuguese and French. It has also had minor influence from and on neighbouring languages such as Saraiki, Punjabi, Balochi, Brahui, Gujarati, and Marwari.

Sindhi has a number of dialects and an established standard form, referred to as Standard Sindhi, which is based on the dialect of Hyderabad and surrounding areas of central Sindh. The primary regulatory agency for the development and promotion of the language is the Sindhi Language Authority, an autonomous institution of the government of Sindh.

The name "Sindhi" is derived from the Sanskrit síndhu, the original name of the Indus River, along whose delta Sindhi is spoken. In the Bronze Age (c. 3300 – c. 1200 BCE), the primary language of this region was likely the Harappan language, but no records exist indicating when or how that language was replaced by the Indo-Aryan languages.

Like other languages of the Indo-Aryan family, Sindhi is descended from Old Indo-Aryan (Sanskrit) via Middle Indo-Aryan (Pali, secondary Prakrits, and Apabhramsha). 20th century Western scholars such as George Abraham Grierson believed that Sindhi descended specifically from the Vrācaḍa dialect of Apabhramsha (described by Markandeya as being spoken in Sindhu-deśa, corresponding to modern Sindh) but later work has shown this to be unclear.

The sound changes that characterise the development of Sindhi from Middle Indo-Aryan are: