ABSTRACT
This chapter gives very brief information about the history of Panjabi and the geographical location of the “Panjabi-speaking areas” where the majority of the people speak it as their first language. The Panjabi dialect areas covered in this book are also shown in the maps given below. Some important Panjabi grammars written since 1812 are also briefly reviewed. According to the latest information available from Ethnologue (in Wikipedia) Panjabi stands 10th among the 6700+ languages of the world if we take into account the number of its speakers of Indian and Pakistani origin (about 102 million or 1.44% of the population of the world). Additionally, speakers of this language are found in almost every inhabited part of the globe. There is a joke that “Panjabis and potatoes are found in every part of the world!” Until a few years ago, the largest chunk of the immigrant population (0.5%) in the UK spoke Panjabi. Now they have been overtaken by the speakers of Polish (1%). Among the speakers of the non-official languages in Canada, the largest group (1.3%) are speakers of Panjabi.
