Pothohari dialect

Pothohari (پوٹھوہاری), Pahari-Potowari, or Potwari is a dialect of Western Punjabi spoken by inhabitants of the Pothohar Plateau in northern Punjab and in Azad Kashmir, Pakistan and Poonch of Jammu and Kashmir, India.

Classification

Since Punjabi, Urdu/Hindi are spoken in a region that has witnessed significant ethnic and identity conflict, all have been exposed to the dialect versus language question. Each of these languages possesses a central standard on which its literature is based, and from which there are multiple dialectal variations.

It had been historically classified as dialect of Punjabi. In the 1920s, Garrison in his Linguist Survey of India classified into Northern cluster of Western Punjabi (Lahnda). Recently Potowari is standardized as language contrasting the view of being a dialect of Punjabi, However this standardization is controversial to date. The development of the standard written language began after the founding of Pakistan in 1947. The national census of Pakistan has tabulated the prevalence of Potowari speakers since 1981.