A landscape described before present state boundaries

Grierson’s 1916 Linguistic Survey calls the variety Powadhi and places its speech area eastwards from the Ludhiana region towards Ambala and the Ghaggar. It also discusses parts of the former Patiala, Nabha and Jind states. These are historical descriptions, predating today’s Punjab–Haryana boundary. The survey describes gradual changes towards neighbouring speech, rather than a perfectly sharp linguistic frontier. The following grammatical notes discuss pronouns and verb forms as well as vocabulary, showing that the survey’s regional comparison extended beyond a list of local words.[1]

Its evidence includes a version of the Prodigal Son and a folktale from Thana Kularan in Jind state. Other folktales came from West Ambala and Thana Karamgarh in Patiala. The survey identifies different writing systems for some specimens. That detail matters: a regional spoken variety could be recorded through more than one script, and the text’s script alone does not establish the speaker’s whole linguistic identity.[1]

The Puadhi collection

The Central Institute of Indian Languages’ 2019 Punjabi corpus documentation includes Puadhi among the regions from which speech was collected, alongside Malwai and Doabi. Its regional account places Puadhi between the Sutlej and Ghaggar and names places including Kharar, Kurali, Ropar, Morinda and Rajpura. It explicitly locates the broader speech area in Punjab and Haryana, making the present administrative border an inadequate definition of the variety.[2]

Selected speech settings

The project’s prompt list includes dates, personal names, place names, frequent words, sentences and command-and-control expressions. These categories give researchers different kinds of recorded material: a place name is a different task from reading a sentence. They also explain why a documented corpus and an older folktale collection are complementary. Each preserves particular elicited or written performances, with a selection process that needs to remain visible when describing Puadhi.[2]

Sources & notes

Source records include access dates and, where known, limits on what was examined. Checks used AI assistance; independent human or specialist review has not been completed.

  1. George A. Grierson. Linguistic Survey of India, volumeIX, partI: Indo-Aryan Family, Central Group; Powadhi section ↗historical linguistic survey · Source date: 1916 · Locator: Printed pp.679–680; specimens pp.681–683; scan images698–702. Accessed 2026-11-01.Actual University of Chicago-hosted page scans inspected, not merely contents. Historical labels and sample provenance are attributed; no obsolete population figures or normative language hierarchies reproduced.Return to A landscape described before present state boundaries, paragraph 1 ↑Return to A landscape described before present state boundaries, paragraph 2 ↑
  2. Poonam Dhillon, Rajesha N, Manasa G, Narayan Choudhary and L. Ramamoorthy; Central Institute of Indian Languages. Punjabi Raw Speech Corpus, chapter31 in Linguistic Resources for AI/NLP in Indian Languages ↗institutional corpus documentation · Source date: 2019-04 · Locator: Printed pp.276–277, section31.1 regional descriptions and speech-data collection; section31.2 prompt dataset. Accessed 2026-11-01.Title/copyright page and actual Punjabi chapter inspected. The complete release-documentation PDF is counted as one work across this batch. No licensed audio files acquired or pronunciation examples invented.Return to The Puadhi collection, paragraph 1 ↑Return to Selected speech settings, paragraph 1 ↑
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Record PH-LAN-0009 · English edition · human review not performed