Sindhi language
Sindhi (/ˈsɪndi/; Sindhi: سِنڌِي (Perso-Arabic), सिन्धी (Devanagari) [sɪndʱiː]) is an Indo-Aryan language spoken by about 30 million people in the Pakistani province of Sindh, where it has official status. It is also spoken by a further 1.7 million people in India, where it is a scheduled language, without any state-level official status. The main writing system is the Perso-Arabic script, which accounts for the majority of the Sindhi literature and is the only one currently used in Pakistan. In India, both the Perso-Arabic script and Devanagari are used.
| Sindhi | |||||||||||||||
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| Sindhī | |||||||||||||||
| سِنڌِي • सिन्धी | |||||||||||||||
Sindhi written in Perso-Arabic script (above) and Devanagari (below) | |||||||||||||||
| Native to | Pakistan, India | ||||||||||||||
| Region | Sindh and near the border in neighbouring regions (e.g. Kutch and Balochistan) | ||||||||||||||
| Ethnicity | Sindhis | ||||||||||||||
Native speakers | c. 32 million (2011–2017) | ||||||||||||||
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| Official status | |||||||||||||||
Official language in | Pakistan India | ||||||||||||||
| Regulated by |
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| Language codes | |||||||||||||||
| ISO 639-1 | sd | ||||||||||||||
| ISO 639-2 | snd | ||||||||||||||
| ISO 639-3 | snd | ||||||||||||||
| Glottolog | sind1272 Sindhi | ||||||||||||||
| Linguasphere | 59-AAF-f | ||||||||||||||
The proportion of people with Sindhi as their mother tongue in each Pakistani District as of the 2017 Pakistan Census | |||||||||||||||
Sindhi is not in the category of endangered according to the classification system of the UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger
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| Part of a series on | |
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| Constitutionally recognised languages of India | |
| Category | |
| 22 Official Languages of the Indian Republic | |
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Sindhi has an attested history from the 10th century CE. Sindhi was one of the first Indo-Aryan languages to encounter influence from Persian and Arabic following the Umayyad conquest in 712 CE. A substantial body of Sindhi literature developed during the Medieval period, the most famous of which is the religious and mystic poetry of Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai from the 18th century. Modern Sindhi was promoted under British rule beginning in 1843, which led to the current status of the language in independent Pakistan after 1947.