Saraiki is a collective form for Southern-Punjabi dialects of the Lahnda group, spoken by around 28 million people in central Pakistan, especially the areas of South Punjab, Southern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Northern Sindh and Eastern Balochistan and the cultural region of Derajat. It is a relatively modern collective term for the Multani, Riyasti and Derawali dialects of the Punjabi language which became common in use after 1962 as a result of a political movement.
Khawaja Ghulam Farid was a 19th-century Sufi poet and mystic from Bahawalpur, Punjab, British India, belonging to the Chishti Order. Most of his work is in his mother tongue Multani, or what is now known as Saraiki. However, he also contributed to the Punjabi, Urdu, Pashto, Sindhi, Hindi and Persian literature. His writing style is characterized by the integration of themes such as death, passionate worldly and spiritual love, and the grief associated with love.
Bahauddin Zakariya University (BZU) (Urdu: جامعۂ بہاءالدین زکریا) is a public university with its main campus located in Multan, Punjab, Pakistan. Bahauddin Zakariya University was founded in 1975 as Multan University, and is the 2nd largest university in Punjab following University of the Punjab. It was renamed in 1979 in honour of the Punjabi Sufi saint Baha-ud-din Zakariya.
Christopher Shackle, is Emeritus Professor of Modern Languages of South Asia at the University of London.
Lahnda, also known as Lahndi or Western Punjabi, 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" or as a "series of dialects" by other authors. Its validity as a genetic grouping is not certain. The terms "Lahnda" and "Western Punjabi" are exonyms employed by linguists, and are not used by the speakers themselves.
Saraiki culture is the culture of the Saraiki people, residing in Pakistan and outside Pakistan.
Mehr Abdul Haq was a philologist from Pakistan.
Jhumar or Dharees, also called Ghumbar, is a traditional folk dance originating in the Bar region and South Punjab of Pakistan. It is a circular dance, historically, it was performed during various celebratory occasions such as weddings, harvest festivals, and other joyful events.
The Punjabi dialects and languages or Greater Panjabic are a series of dialects and Indo-Aryan languages spoken around the Punjab region of Pakistan and India with varying degrees of official recognition. They have sometimes been referred to as the Greater Punjabi macrolanguage. Punjabi may also be considered as a pluricentric language with more than one standard variety.
The Saraikis are a multi-ethnic community native to central Pakistan, unified by their use of the Saraiki language and a shared regional identity that transcends tribal and ethnic affiliations.
Anwaar Ahmad is an Urdu short story writer, scholar and academic from Pakistan. Presently, he is serving as the Director General at University of Gujrat's Sialkot Campus. He has been associated with Bahauddin Zakariya University, Multan, and Government College University, Faisalabad as an academic, researcher, and departmental head (Urdu) for over 35 years. He has also served as a visiting professor at Ankara University in Ankara, Turkey and the Urdu department at Osaka University of Foreign Studies in Osaka, Japan.
Riasti is a term used for a group of Lahnda varieties spoken in the Cholistan Desert along the banks of the river Sutlej in the southern Punjab, Pakistan. Its definition is imprecise, and is usually taken to refer to the central (Multani) and southern dialects of Saraiki language which were spoken in the former riasat (transl. state) of Bahawalpur, in what are now the Bahawalpur and Rahim Yar Khan districts, respectively. The southern dialect, also known as Bahawalpuri, is spoken in the southern parts of Dera Ghazi Khan as well.
There are three writing systems for Saraiki:
Multani is a Brahmic script originating in the Multan region of Punjab and in northern Sindh, Pakistan. It was used to write Saraiki, often considered a dialect of Lahnda group of languages. The script was used for routine writing and commercial activities. Multani is one of four Landa scripts whose usage was extended beyond the mercantile domain and formalized for literary activity and printing; the others being Gurmukhi, Khojki, and Khudabadi. Although Multani is now obsolete, it is a historical script in which written and printed records exist. It was also known as Karikki and as Sarai.
Dr. Shakir Shujabadi is a prominent Saraiki-language poet in Shujabad, a small city near Multan, Pakistan.
Multani is a Unicode block containing characters used for writing the Multani alphabet, a Brahmic script used in the Multan region of Punjab and in northern Sindh in Pakistan. The script is now obsolete, but was historically used to write the Saraiki language.
Lutf Ali (1716–1794) was an 18th-century poet from Bahawalpur, Punjab, active in the Bahawalpuri dialect. He was born in the village of Mao in present-day Rahim Yar Khan District. He wrote the popular narrative poem Saifalnāma in 1781 based on a tale from the One Thousand and One Nights.
Jatki, Jadgali, and other related terms have sometimes been used to refer to one or another of the Indo-Aryan languages spoken in Balochistan and neighbouring parts of Sindh and Punjab.
