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Why Study Punjabi?

Punjabi (also transliterated as Panjabi) is spoken by eighty million people in South Asia and other British Commonwealth countries. It has been in use as a literary language since the eleventh century. It is the language of the sacred scriptures of the Sikhs, the official language of the state of Punjab in India, and a language of Sikh and Sufi mysticism and of regional literature among Punjabi Muslims in Pakistan. In Canada, Punjabi is the fourth largest spoken language after English, French and Chinese, while in the USA it is spoken by about half a million Punjabi and Sikh immigrants.  Punjabi is an Indo-Aryan language closely related to earlier forms of Hindi and the two languages are to some extent mutually intelligible even today. Punjabi is usually written in a different but similar script to that used for Hindi, one that was devised by one of the Gurus of the Sikh religion. The Punjabi program at the University of Michigan is the oldest in the US.