or Panjabi language
Indo-Aryan language of the Punjab in India and Pakistan.
Punjabi has about 26 million speakers in India and more than 60 million in Pakistan
nearly half the population of the latter
but linguists have sometimes considered the dialects of southwestern, western, and northern Punjab province in Pakistan a different language. Inhabitants of southern Punjab province have agitated for consideration of their speech, Siraiki (with more than 12 million speakers), as a distinct language, though Siraiki and Punjabi are mutually intelligible.