International Mother Language Day 2026: An open letter to Punjabi
Dear Maa Boli Punjabi,
Heartiest greetings to you on International Mother Language Day 2026. I extend my As-salamu alaykum, Sat Sri Akal and Namaskar to you, a tongue that has been spoken in one of the world’s most important frontier areas, one that has incidentally also been a ‘cradle of civilisation’.
This day is recognised by the United Nations to promote linguistic diversity and multilingualism. And who better than you know the damage and hurt that monolingualism and linguistic insularity can cause.
But it was not always like this. There have been times when you were not treated like the way you have been in recent decades. The memories of those times are still fresh in the minds of some (if not all) of your children (speakers).
You evolved as a distinct language of the Indo-Aryan branch of the great Indo-European family of languages sometime around the 7th to 11th centuries Common Era from Shauraseni Apabhramsa. Through this association, you count Sanskrit, Hindi-Urdu, Sindhi, Kashmiri, Gujarati, Marathi, Bangla, Maithili, Odia, Axomiya, Sinhala, Pashto, Farsi, English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Russian, Greek and Latin as your cousins. Whew! That is a big grand family indeed.
Having taken birth in a strategic crossroads region, home to a great river (the Indus/Sindhu) and its five tributaries (Jhelum, Ravi, Chenab, Beas and Sutlej), you were the beloved mother of its inhabitants.
Who can forget Sheikh or ‘Baba’ Farid Ganjshakar of Pakpattan writing his Saloks in you? Those verses still hold a pride of place in every Punjabi’s heart, whether they are in Manhattan or Mandi Gobindgarh.
And then there is Baba Guru Nanak, the ‘Guru of the Hindus and the Pir of the Muslims’. Through him and his nine successors, you are the liturgical language of nearly 30 million people, known by their distinctive appearance and their daring-do attitude globally.
There have been others who pampered you to no end. Think the kaafis of Baba Bulleh Shah of Kasur. Shah Hussain. Waris Shah. Khwaja Ghulam Farid. Damodar Das Arora. Dhani Ram Chatrik. Bhai Vir Singh. And yes, the Punjabi Keats, Shiv Kumar Batalvi.
Ah. Those were heady days and times. But as George Harrison sang, all things must pass.
So, we today find that you are struggling. Because if there were those who appreciated and adored you, there were also those who hated (and do hate) you.
Often, the worst prejudice one suffers is from one’s own. So too is the case with you, dear Maa Boli.
For the past millennium, you were on the lips of every peasant, every craftsman, the masses of the Punjab, that great borderland which I mentioned earlier. Trouble is, you were never on the lips of those who were its masters.
The Delhi Sultans and the Mughals, even the Sikh Empire favoured Farsi over you as the language of the courts. And when people from a land across the seven seas took over Punjab in 1849, they brought over an alien tongue, one more at home on the ridges of Delhi and the doab of the Ganga and the Yamuna: Urdu.
The British had reasons to prefer Urdu over you. For one, they feared a reprisal by the Sikhs they had defeated. As a bonus, they also had a ready workforce, a pool of professionals well-versed in Urdu who then assisted them in administering the newly conquered territory. But the damage this move of theirs did to you was immense.
The British period also saw the first traces of the (very wrong) stereotype emerge about you being a ‘rustic tongue’. You were deemed the language of peasants and the masses, not of the elites. It was an image that was to and still haunts you.
Worse was to follow. The British period saw consolidation of your speakers on religious lines — Punjabi Muslims, Punjabi Sikhs and Punjabi Hindus. Again, you suffered. The Arya Samaj movement that found favour among Punjabi Hindus (disclaimer: the author is a Punjabi Hindu and from an Arya Samaji background) favoured Hindi. The Punjabi Muslims favoured Urdu. And the Singh Sabha Movement among the Sikhs consolidated around a Punjabi identity.
Years passed. 1947, your annus horribilis arrived. The Punjab was torn asunder and divided among two new, independent dominions. The pre-Independence positions of its religious groups remained unchanged. In Pakistan’s province, your Muslim children tried to be more loyal to Urdu than to you, making it not just the provincial-level language but also the Qaumi Zubaan, the national tongue.
In India, positions hardened between your Sikh and Hindu children, with each favouring you and Hindi respectively. The politics of the Punjabi Suba Movement and the relations between Punjab state and the Centre led to terrible consequences, which haunt us Punjabis till today.
It is not as if nobody is fighting your cause today. You have made your way to popular cinema in India and to locations across the Anglosphere. Art forms performed in you, including Bhangra and Giddha, are extremely popular among even non-Punjabi audiences, as are traditional ones like Boliyan, Tappe, Qisse and Savaiye.
And yet, that image of you as a ‘rustic tongue’, refuses to go away. People within Punjab, India, refuse to speak in you and teach their children other tongues. This is ‘language death’ in linguistic terms.
Why should anyone hate you? You have the unique quality among Indo-European languages of being a ‘tonal language’ with distinct pitch tones to differentiate words. Who can also forget that you yourself consist of various dialects — from Jhangi and Chinioti in Pakistan to Doabi and Malwi in India to Majhi, the central dialect of Lahore, Amritsar, Kasur, Gurdaspur, Tarn Taran, Pathankot and Sheikhupura, which makes up your standard form. Not to forget similar tongues that are spoken near you in India and Pakistan — from Dogri in India to Multani/Seraiki/Derawali and Hindko in Pakistan.
Most importantly, you contain within you, a treasure trove of words, phrases, sayings, metaphors and parables unique to that land where you were born. If you are lost, the memories of the Punjab will be gone forever. That of the mountains that ring it, the monotonously flat land, the keekar trees, the Persian wheels and the interfluves between its great torrents of water, its five rivers.
The situation does look very despondent for you. In today’s era of overwhelming monolingualism and linguistic insularity, many tongues are dying fast. Will you follow? I hope not.
I can only take heart in what the Third Sikh Master, Guru Amar Das, said about you. When asked as to why the scripture of the emerging Sikh faith used you instead of Sanskrit, the language of the gods, the Guru simply answered: “Sanskrit is known to only a few people and is thus like the water in a well. Punjabi is known to everyone and is thus like rain which falls across the land and quenches its thirst.”
That is your power, dear Maa Boli. You are egalitarian and accessible to everyone who wants to speak in you. Never let go of that.
With this spirit of Chardi Kala (buoyant hope) coined by another great son who wrote in you (the Tenth Sikh Master, Guru Gobind Singh), I wish you all the best for the future.
Lovingly and respectfully yours,
One of your children.