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From: John Cowan <cowan@ccil.org>
Subject: Re: Hindi / Urdu And other IE Indian Languages
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Date: Thu, 23 Jan 1997 15:09:56 GMT
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Misha Chaitanya Chitharanjan wrote:

> Also, what of other North Indian IE languages, such as Punjabi?  I
> know a few Hindi speakers that can understand a little bit of Punjabi
> even though they never learned it in school or anywhere else.  This
> leads me to believe that perhaps it is more of a distant dialect than
> another language?

Although the lines between standard Hindi and standard Punjabi are
fairly sharp, there is a dialect continuum between them.  With the
large-scale eastward migration of Punjabi-speakers that began in the
1940s, it is now possible to find styles of Punjabi that are arbitrarily
close to standard Hindi: the Punjabi of Delhi might better be called
Hindi from a descriptive viewpoint, but its speakers still think of
themselves as speaking Punjabi.

-- 
John Cowan						cowan@ccil.org
			e'osai ko sarji la lojban
