Sindhi language

The variety of Sindhi spoken by Sindhi Hindus who emigrated to India is known as Dukslinu Sindhi. Furthermore, Kutchi and Jadgali are sometimes classified as dialects of Sindhi rather than independent languages.

Sindhi has a relatively large inventory of both consonants and vowels compared to other Indo-Aryan languages.

Sindhi nouns distinguish two genders (masculine and feminine), two numbers (singular and plural), and five cases (nominative, vocative, oblique, ablative, and locative). This is a similar paradigm to Punjabi. Almost all Sindhi noun stems end in a vowel, except for some recent loanwords. The declension of a noun in Sindhi is largely determined from its grammatical gender and the final vowel (or if there is no final vowel). Generally, -o stems are masculine and -a stems are feminine, but the other final vowels can belong to either gender.

The different paradigms are listed below with examples.^[55] The ablative and locative cases are used with only some lexemes in the singular number and hence not listed, but predictably take the suffixes -ā̃ / -aū̃ / -ū̃ (ABL) and -i (LOC).

A few nouns representing familial relations take irregular declensions with an extension in -r- in the plural. These are the masculine nouns ڀاءُ‎ bhāu "brother", پِيءُ‎ pīu "father", and the feminine nouns ڌِيءَ‎ dhīa "daughter", نُونھَن‎ nū̃hã "daughter-in-law", ڀيڻَ‎ bheṇa "sister", ماءُ‎ māu "mother", and جوءِ‎ joi "wife".^[55]

Like other Indo-Aryan languages, Sindhi has first and second-person personal pronouns as well as several types of third-person proximal and distal demonstratives. These decline in the nominative and oblique cases. The genitive is a special form for the first and second-person singular, but formed as usual with the oblique and case marker جو jo for the rest. The personal pronouns are listed to the right.^[56][57]

The third-person pronouns are listed below. Besides the unmarked demonstratives, there are also "specific" and "present" demonstratives. In the nominative singular, the demonstratives are marked for gender. Some other pronouns which decline identically to ڪو‎ ko "someone" are ھَرڪو‎ har-ko "everyone", سَڀڪو‎ sabh-ko "all of them", جيڪو‎ je-ko "whoever" (relative), and تيڪو‎ te-ko "that one" (correlative).^[56]

Most nominal relations (e.g. the semantic role of a nominal as an argument to a verb) are indicated using postpositions, which follow a noun in the oblique case. The subject of the verb takes the bare oblique case, while the object may be in nominative case or in oblique case and followed by the accusative case marker کي khe.^[58]

The postpositions are divided into case markers, which directly follow the noun, and complex postpositions, which combine with a case marker (usually the genitive جو jo).

The case markers are listed below.^[58]: 399

The postpositions with the suffix -o decline in gender and number to agree with their governor, e.g. ڇوڪِرو جو پِيءُ‎ chokiro j-o pīu "the boy's father" but ڇوڪِر جِي مَاءُ‎ chokiro j-ī māu "the boy's mother".

There are several ablative case markers formed from the spatial postpositions and the ablative ending -ā̃. These indicate complex motion such as "from inside of".^[58]: 400

Finally, some case markers are found in medieval Sindhi literature and/or modern poetic Sindhi, and otherwise not used in standard speech.

The complex postpositions are formed with a case marker, usually the genitive but sometimes the ablative. Many are listed below.^[58]: 405

According to historian

During the British Raj, a variant of the Persian alphabet was adopted for Sindhi in the 19th century. The script is used in Pakistan and India today. It has a total of 52 letters, augmenting the Persian with digraphs and eighteen new letters (ڄ ٺ ٽ ٿ ڀ ٻ ڙ ڍ ڊ ڏ ڌ ڇ ڃ ڦ ڻ ڱ ڳ ڪ‎) for sounds particular to Sindhi and other Indo-Aryan languages. Some letters that are distinguished in Arabic or Persian are homophones in Sindhi.

Below table presents Sindhi Perso-Arabic alphabet. Letters shaded in yellow are solely used in writing of loanwords, and the phoneme they represent are also represented by other letters in the alphabet. Letters and digraphs shaded in green aren't usually considered as part of the base alphabet. They are either commonly used digraphs representing aspirated consonants, or are ligatures serving a grammatical function. These ligatures include the ۽‎, which is pronounced as [ãĩ̯] and represents and, and the ۾‎, which is pronounced as [mẽ] and it creates a locative relationship between words.

The orthography of the letter hāʾ in Sindhi, especially as it comes to typing as opposed to handwriting, has been a source of confusion for many. Especially because whereas in Arabic and Persian, there exists one single letter for hāʾ, in Urdu, the letter has diverged into two distinct variants: gol he ("round he") and do-cašmi he ("two-eyed he"). The former is written is written round and zigzagged as "ہـ ـہـ ـہ ہ", and can impart the "h" (/ɦ/) sound anywhere in a word, or the long "a" or the "e" vowels (/ɑː/ or /eː/) at the end of a word. The latter is written in Arabic Naskh style (as a loop) (ھ) , in order to be used in digraphs and to create the aspirate consonants.

For most aspirated consonants, Sindhi relies on unique letters as opposed to the Urdu practice of digraphs. However, this doesn't apply to all aspirated consonants. Some are still written as digraphs. The letter hāʾ is also used in Sindhi to represent the sound [h] in native Sindhi words, in Arabic and Persian loanwords, and to represent vowels (/ə/ or /əʰ/) at the end of the word. The notations and conventions in Sindhi are different from either Persian or Arabic and from Urdu. Given the variety of the types of hāʾ across these languages for which Unicode characters have been designed, in order for the letters to be displayed correctly when typing, a correct and consistent convention needs to be followed. The following table will present these in detail.^[65][66]

The punctuation of Sindhi Perso-Arabic script differs slightly from that of Urdu, Persian, and Arabic. Namely, instead of using the typical inverted comma (،‎ [U+060C]) common in these mentioned alphabet, a reversed comma (⹁‎ [U+2E41]) is used. Although many documents do indeed incorrectly use Urdu punctuations.^[67]

In India, the Devanagari script is also used to write Sindhi.

Laṇḍā-based scripts, such as

The Khudabadi alphabet was invented in 1550 CE, and was used alongside other scripts by the Hindu community until the colonial era, where the sole usage of the Arabic script for official purposes was legislated.

The script continued to be used on a smaller scale by the trader community until the Partition of India in 1947.^[70]

ə	a	ɪ	i	ʊ	uː	e	ɛ	o	ɔ
k	kʰ		ɡ	ɠ			ɡʱ		ŋ
c	cʰ		ɟ	ʄ			ɟʱ		ɲ
ʈ	ʈʰ		ɖ	ɗ			ɽ	ṛ	ɳ
t	tʰ		d				dʱ		n
p	pʰ	f	b	ɓ			bʱ		m
j	r	l	ʋ
ʂ		s	h

Khojki was employed primarily to record Muslim Shia Ismaili religious literature, as well as literature for a few secret Shia Muslim sects.^{[68] [71]}

The Gurmukhi script was also used to write Sindhi, mainly in India by Hindus.^[70][68]

The Sindhi-Roman script or Roman-Sindhi script is the contemporary Sindhi script usually used by the Sindhis when texting messages on their mobile phones.^[72][73]

In 1972, an bill was passed by the provincial assembly of Sindh which saw Sindhi, given official status thus becoming the first provincial language in Pakistan to have its own official status.

• Sindhi language was made the official language of Sindh according to Language Bill.
• All Educational institutes in Sindh are mandated to teach Sindhi as per the bill.

By 2001,

In June 2014, the Khudabadi script of the Sindhi language was added to Unicode, However as of now the script currently has no proper rendering support to view it in unsupported devices.

• 1972 Sindhi Language Bill
• Institute of Sindhology
• Sindhi Transliteration
• Languages of India
• Languages of Pakistan
• Languages with official status in India
• List of Sindhi-language films
• Provincial languages of Pakistan
• Sindhi literature
• Sindhi poetry

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External links

Sindhi edition of Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Wikivoyage has a travel guide for Sindhi phrasebook.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Sindhi language.

Wikisource has the text of a 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica article about Sindhi language.

• Sindhi Language Authority
• Sindhi Dictionary
• All about Sindhi language and culture at the Wayback Machine (archived August 31, 2015)
• Mewaram's 1910 Sindhi-English dictionary