Lahnda_language
Lahnda
Group of Northwestern Indo-Aryan language varieties
Lahnda (/ˈlɑːndə/;[1] لہندا), also known as Lahndi or Western Punjabi,[2] is a group of north-western Indo-Aryan language varieties spoken in parts of Pakistan and India. It is defined in the ISO 639 standard as a "macrolanguage"[3] or as a "series of dialects" by other authors.[4][lower-alpha 1] Its validity as a genetic grouping is not certain.[5] The terms "Lahnda" and "Western Punjabi" are exonyms employed by linguists, and are not used by the speakers themselves.[4]
Lahnda includes the following languages: Saraiki (spoken mostly in southern Pakistani Punjab by about 26 million people), Jatki dialects, the diverse varieties of Hindko (with almost five million speakers in north-western Punjab and neighbouring regions of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, especially Hazara), Pahari/Pothwari (3.5 million speakers in the Pothohar region of Punjab, Azad Kashmir and parts of Indian Jammu and Kashmir), Khetrani (20,000 speakers in Balochistan), and Inku (a possibly extinct language of Afghanistan).[citation needed] Ethnologue also subsumes under Lahnda a group of varieties that it labels as "Western Punjabi" (ISO 639-3 code: pnb) – the Majhi dialects transitional between Lahnda and Eastern Punjabi; these are spoken by about 66 million people.[3][6]