Saraiki

Saraiki, also spelled Seraiki and Siraiki, may refer to:

See also

Saraiki dialect

Saraiki (Shahmukhi: سرائیکی), is the southern dialect of Western Punjabi of the Indo-Aryan language family. It is spoken by 20 million people (2013) across the South Punjab, southern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and border regions of North Sindh and Eastern Balochistan, with some 70,000 migrants and their descendants in India, who migrated as a result of the partition of British India, as well as overseas, especially in the Middle East. Saraiki is also spoken by some Hindus in Afghanistan, though the number there is unknown.

It follows the standardized Punjabi Shahmukhi script for writing. The name "Saraiki" (or variant spellings) was formally adopted in the 1960s by regional social and political leaders who undertook to promote Saraiki dialects of the Punjabi language.

Etymology

The word sarāiki likely originated from sauvīrā, or Sauvira, a kingdom name in ancient India which was also mentioned in the Sanskrit epic Mahabharata. By adding adjectival suffix -kī to the word sauvīrā it became sauvīrakī. The consonant v with its neighboring vowels was dropped for simplification and hence the name became sarāiki. Although George Abraham Grierson reported that sirāiki (that was the spelling he used) is from a Sindhi word sirō, meaning "of the north, northern", Shackle asserts that this etymology is unverified. Another view is that sarāiki originates from the word sarai.