Persian and Sindhi: Language Contact and Influences

Abstract

Sindhi is one of the most ancient and prominent languages of South Asia. Whereas, Persian is considered an important polycentric language of the Eastern and Central regions of Asia. For a prolonged period, it has remained lingua franca, as well as the official and cultural language of kingdoms of this region. In Sindh, it has long historical, political, cultural, and language contact with Sindhi. It has remained prevalent during different periods, in administration, judiciary, education, literature, and other domains, with having the status of the prestigious language. This paper presents the study of the Persian language’s historical background in Sindh and its contact with the Sindhi language and its consequent influences due to language contact situations. For this purpose, by using content analysis and observation method, the related written literature and spoken discourse were analyzed. Analytical results clearly reveal that due to the relationship of prolonging span, Sindhi has accrued deep linguistic influences of Persian. Especially, the inclusion of a lot of Persian borrowed words in Sindhi greatly enhanced Sindhi vocabulary’s repertoire. Besides, Sindhi also accepted some phonetic, morphological, and syntactic, influence from Persian. Presently, Sindhi is directly in connection with Persianised Pakistani Urdu. This process can further increase the Persian’s historical linguistic influences on Sindhi.