Sindhi language

Categories: Indo-Aryan languages | Languages of India | Languages of Pakistan | Sindh

Sindhi (سنڌي، سندھی, सिन्धी)
Spoken in:	Pakistan, India. Also Hong Kong SAR, Oman, Philippines, Singapore, UAE, UK, USA
Region:	South Asia
Total speakers:	19.7 million
Ranking:	47
Genetic classification:	Indo-European Indo-Iranian Indo-Aryan Northwestern Zone Sindhi
Official status
Official language of:	Pakistan, India
Regulated by:	--
Language codes
ISO 639-1	sd
ISO 639-2	snd
SIL	SND
See also: Language – List of languages

Sindhi (سنڌي، سندھی, सिन्धी) is the language of the Sindh region of South Asia, which is now a province of Pakistan. It is an Indo-Aryan language spoken by approximately 17 million people in Pakistan, and 2.8 million in India; it is also a recognised official language in both of these countries. Most Sindhi speakers in Pakistan are concentrated in Sindh. The remaining speakers are found spread throughout the many areas of the world (mainly other parts of India) to which members of an ethnic group migrated when Sindh became a part of Pakistan during the partition of British India in 1947. The language is written using the Devanagari or Arabic scripts.

1 Geographical distribution
2 History
3 Sounds
- 3.1 Consonants
- 3.2 Vowels
4 Writing system
5 See also
6 Khushboo - Online Sindhi Magazine
7 References
8 External links

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Geographical distribution

Sindhi is taught as a first language in the schools of south-east Pakistan, except in large metropolises like Karachi. Sindhi language has a vast vocabulary; this has made it a favourite of many writers and so a lot of literature and poetry has been written in Sindhi.

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History

Sindhi was a very popular literary language around the 14th-18th centuries. This is when sufis such as Shah Abdul Latif (as well as numerous others) narrated their theosophical poetry depicting the relationship between humans and God.

The Qur'an was first translated into Sindhi in rhymatic format. This was the first ever translation of Qur'an in the 12th century or earlier.

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Sounds

Sindhi has a very rich sound inventory. It has 46 distinctive consonant phonemes (more than all the phonemes of English combined) and a further 10 vowels. All plosives, affricates, nasals, the retroflex flap and the lateral approximant /l/ have aspirated or breathy voiced counterparts. The language also features four separate implosives.

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Consonants

	Bilabial		Labiodental	Dental		Alveolar		Post- alveolar		Palatal		Velar		Glottal
Plosives	p p^h	b b^ɦ		t t^h	d d^ɦ			ʈ ʈ^h	ɖ ɖ^ɦ			k k^h	g g^ɦ
Implosives		ɓ					ɗ				ʄ		ɠ
Affricates										c c^h	ɟ ɟ^ɦ
Nasals	m m^ɦ					n n^ɦ		ɳ ɳ^ɦ		ɲ		ŋ
Fricatives			f			s	z	ʂ				x	ɣ	h
Taps and flaps						r		ɽ ɽ^ɦ
Approximants			ʋ							j
Lateral approximants				l l^ɦ

The phoneme /r/ is usually pronounced as an alveolar tap, [ɾ], though occasionally reminiscent of a trill with two or more contacts. The affricates /c, c^h, ɟ, ɟ^ɦ/ are pronounced with a relatively short release and corresponding plosives symbols have therefore been used. /ʋ/ can be realized as either [w] or [ʋ] with free variation.

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Vowels

Image:Sindhi vowel chart.png

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Writing system

In Pakistan, Sindhi is written in a variant of the Arabic script, which was adopted under the encouragement of the British when Sindh fell to the British in the 19th century. It has a total of 52 Arabic-derived letters, accommodating the additional sounds peculiar to Indo-Aryan languages.

In India, Sindhi is written in the Devanagari script.

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