Sindhi language

Sindhi (سِنڌِي, Sindhī, [sɪndʱiː]) is an Indo-Aryan language belonging to the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European language family. It is primarily spoken by the Sindhi people native to the Pakistani province of Sindh, where the language has official status. It constitutes the mother tongue of over 34 million people in Pakistan, primarily concentrated in Sindh; with historic communities in neighbouring Balochistan as well. It is also spoken by 1.7 million people in India, with it having the status of a scheduled language in the country without any state-level official status. Sindhi is written in the Sindhi alphabet of the Perso-Arabic script, the sole official script for the language in Pakistan; while in India, both the Perso-Arabic and Devanagari scripts are used.

With over 40 million native speakers, Sindhi is a major South Asian language, being the most-widely spoken language in southern Pakistan and third most-widely spoken in the entirety of Pakistan (after Punjabi and Pashto). The language is also geographically spread out of South Asia as it is spoken by the Sindhi diaspora, present around the world, primarily in India, the Gulf states, the Western world and the Far East.

Being classified under the Northwestern branch of the Indo-Aryan languages, Sindhi, apart from other Sindhic languages, is most closely related to Punjabi language. It is descended from Shauraseni Prakrit, which gradually developed into Apabhraṃśa and then into Early Sindhi. Sindhi further developed during the Islamic Golden Age and the Islamic period in South Asia, expanding its vocabulary under the influence of Arabic and Persian; with the earliest written evidence of Sindhi as a language being a translation of the Quran, dated back to 883 AD. Middle Sindhi produced the language's greatest pieces of literature, including recorded forms of orally-transmitted folk tales; as well as Sufi literature, including Shah Jo Risalo, the single greatest piece of Sindhi literature, by Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai.