🇮🇳 Saraiki #70 Most Spoken Language (25M speakers)

• Saraiki: The most common current English spelling.
• Siraiki / Seraiki: Older or alternate spellings still seen in books, websites, and department names.
• Multani: A historical regional label still found in older discussions.
• Saraiki Punjabi: A search label used by readers who want the Punjabi connection made explicit.

Saraiki and Punjabi are close neighbors in both geography and language history. They share a large amount of vocabulary and many familiar Indo-Aryan patterns.
Still, Saraiki is not just “Punjabi with an accent.” The clearest differences appear in phonology, especially its implosive consonants and the fact that Saraiki does not use tone in the same way standard Punjabi does.

• Implosives: Saraiki is known for a set of implosive consonants that stand out in South Asian language description.
• No Punjabi-Type Tone System: Standard Punjabi is tonal; Saraiki is usually described as stress-based instead.
• Retained Aspiration: Historical aspirated sounds remain more clearly segmental in Saraiki than in Punjabi tone patterns.
• Nasalization: Vowel nasalization is also a real part of the language.

• Basic Order: Saraiki usually follows Subject–Object–Verb.
• Postpositions: Like many Indo-Aryan languages, it uses postpositions rather than English-style prepositions.
• Agreement: Adjectives and verbs may show agreement with gender and number.
• Shared Regional Structure: Readers familiar with Punjabi, Sindhi, or Urdu will notice both overlap and clear local patterns.

Linguistic descriptions often list varieties such as Central Saraiki, Southern Saraiki, Northern Saraiki, and Sindhi Saraiki.
Some descriptions also mention Jhangi and Shahpuri. These labels matter because local speech changes across the Saraiki belt, especially near Punjabi-, Sindhi-, and Pashto-speaking areas.

Saraiki has a long literary life, with poetry holding a central place.
One of the names most often linked with Saraiki literary culture is Khawaja Ghulam Farid. University departments in Pakistan still foreground his poetry when teaching Saraiki language and literature.

Many general language pages stop at “written in Arabic script,” but that misses an important detail. Saraiki spelling uses added letters for sounds that matter in the language itself. Unicode explicitly includes letters used for Saraiki orthography, such as ݙ and ݨ. That matters for keyboards, search, web fonts, OCR, text archives, and language technology.

There is no single everyday romanization used by all speakers online. You will see spellings such as Saraiki, Seraiki, and Siraiki. This is one reason the language can look more fragmented in web search than it really is.

Saraiki is not limited to home use. The Islamia University of Bahawalpur offers BS, MPhil, and PhD work in Siraiki, and Bahauddin Zakariya University in Multan also maintains a Saraiki department. This gives the language a living academic base.

Saraiki also has visible public use in media. Pakistan’s national news agency, APP, lists Saraiki among its language options. That kind of official digital presence helps normalize written Saraiki for everyday reading, not just literature and local broadcasting.

Reference works do not all label it in the same way. Ethnologue gives Saraiki its own ISO code, Britannica treats it as an Indo-Aryan language, and Glottolog places it inside a wider Greater Panjabic grouping. For most readers, the practical point is simple: Saraiki has its own recognized name, literary use, phonology, and written conventions.

Mainly in southern Punjab in Pakistan, with speech communities extending into northern Sindh, parts of Balochistan, and parts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Smaller communities are also associated with India.

The 2023 Pakistan census places Saraiki at 12.00% of the national population, which means roughly 29 million mother-tongue speakers in Pakistan alone.

In Pakistan, it is mainly written in a Perso-Arabic script of the Shahmukhi type, written from right to left, with added letters for Saraiki sounds. Some materials also use Gurmukhi.

The biggest differences appear in phonology. Saraiki is well known for implosive consonants and for not using Punjabi-style tone as a central contrast. It also has local vocabulary and regional grammatical habits shaped by long contact with neighboring languages.

Partial understanding is common, especially in areas with close contact. Full effortless understanding should not be assumed, because Saraiki differs in sound patterns, local vocabulary, and some grammatical details.