Punjabi is an Indo-Aryan language native to the region of Punjab of Pakistan and India and spoken by the Punjabi people. This page discusses the grammar of Modern Standard Punjabi as defined by the relevant sources below (see #Further reading).
History of study
Precursors Grammar is known as pañjābī viākarana in Punjabi. Sikh exegesis and hermeneutics dates back to the period of the Sikh gurus and was developed further by sects and traditions like the Bhais, Udasis, Minas, Nirmalas, and Gianis. An early sample of such a kind of Sikh grammatical work are three glossary manuscripts known as Paryaye that are preserved in the Bavarian State Library in Munich. These manuscripts were collected by Ernest Trumpp during his time at Lahore in 1871. The Singh Sabha movement would introduce Western approaches and scientific methods to the study of language and literature, including grammar.
Colonial period The earliest Western studies on the Punjabi language was mostly conducted by Christian missionary organisations, such as the Serampore Mission Press and the later Ludhiana Mission Press, who produced translations, grammars, and dictionaries, being facilitated by the colonial administration. The purpose of such work was primarily for teaching and translation based upon previous work which had been conducted on either Sanskrit or English (such as in regards to categories and word-class). According to Jeffrey M. Diamond, the Christian missionaries had a better understanding of Punjabi linguistics than the colonial administrators. Scientific study of Punjabi grammar dates back to 1812 with the publication of a grammar work by William Carey. However, according to Sahar Afshar it was actually published in early 1813 despite the year 1812 being its colophon. Carey's work was not viewed as useful by his contemporaries. In 1838, another grammar book on Punjabi with the same title as the 1812 work by Lieutenant John Leech of the Bombay Engineers, was published. Leech's Punjabi grammar book utilizes romanized Punjabi, with some Devanagari and Perso-Arabic usage as well. Leech must have published his grammar book without knowledge of the previous Punjabi grammar book of the same name that had earlier been published by William Carey. This publication was followed in 1849 by yet another grammar book on Punjabi by Captain Samuel Cross Starkey, whom was a British Colonial Officer in India. Starkey's grammar book only employs romanized Punjabi with no usage of native scripts.
Research into Punjabi grammar was spear-headed by the Ludhiana Mission as a grammatical understanding of the local vernacular was needed for the training of Christian missionaires and colonial administrators. The mission found the previous grammatical works by Carey and Leech as not being helpful and lacking. Instead, they focused on using European and American categories for understanding Punjabi grammatical terms and phrases. They mostly utilized the Punjabi variety spoken in the Ludhiana area. The mission's works focused on comparing Punjabi with Urdu, as much of the readers or target audience had a background in using Urdu. The Ludhiana Mission Press, under the supervision of Reverend James Porter, published a grammar book on Punjabi by John Newton, titled A Grammar of the Panjabi Language; With Appendices in 1851. The motivation for publishing this grammar book was due to the aftermath of the annexation of much of Punjab in 1849 after the downfall of the Sikh Empire resulting from the Second Anglo-Sikh War. Many British colonial officials, only familiar with Urdu, began coming into Punjab after the 1849 annexation, so this work attempts to instruct them in the local Punjabi-language. Newton's Punjabi grammar book does make explicit mention of the previous grammar book that was written by William Carey, however whilst being sympathetic, Newton does note inaccuracies in Carey's earlier work. Newton's grammar book focuses mostly on how Punjabi grammar differs from Urdu grammar, rather than being solely dedicated to the comprehensive study of Punjabi's grammar itself. Newton's grammar book is divided into two main partitions: orthography and orthoepy (including syntax), with these main sections being divided into smaller parts based on adjectives, nouns, adverbs, pronouns, interjections, conjunctions, verbs, etc. Newton's Punjabi grammar book would later be republished in 1866, owing to its acclaim and popularity. John Beames included Punjabi in his three-volume work on the grammar of northern Indian languages in 1872, also covering Punjabi in an 1875 work. Wilson (1899) also composed an early analysis.
Later up until 1916, many foreign and native scholars analyzed the language's grammar, most notably George Abraham Grierson of the Linguistic Survey of India (in 1916 and 1919Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. IX: Indo-Aryan Family, Central Group, Part I: Specimens of Western Hindī and Pañjābī (Calcutta: Superintendent Government Printing, India, 1916) by George Abraham Grierson. Retrieved on 1 September 2026 via The Digital South Asia Library, University of Chicago.Linguistic Survey of India, Vol. VIII: Indo-Aryan Family, North-Western Group, Part I: Specimens of Sindhī and Lahndā (Calcutta: Superintendent Government Printing, India, 1919) by George Abraham Grierson. Retrieved on 1 September 2026 via The Digital South Asia Library, University of Chicago.), while other grammar works were authored by E. P. Newton (1896, focusing on literary Punjabi) and Cummings and Bailey (1912, focusing on oral Punjabi). Bailey (1904, 1914, 1926) composed a number of works on tones in Punjabi. Most of these studies focused on teaching the language, sometimes including a list of vocabulary but a lack of phonological and grapholinguistic analyses (instead relying upon semiphonetic Romanization), with the inclusion of the eight parts of speech (nouns, pronouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, and interjections), and each one was an improvement over the former, with eventually a distinction being made between oral and written Punjabi. Noun morphology was characterized better than verbs and challenging grammatical concepts (such as finite verb tenses) were showcased using example sentences. Colonial-era native grammarians included Ram Singh (1924), Karam Singh Gangawala (1935), and Banarsi Das Jain (1935).
Post-independence In the post-independence period, further studies on Punjabi grammar were conducted by Piara Singh Padam (1954), Duni Chandra (1959), Sant Singh Sekhon (1961), Bahl (1969, 1974), the Linguistic Atlas of the Punjab (1973), Masica (1993), Gurbachan Singh Sidhu (2004), Bahl (1957, 1969), Gill (1960, 1962), Arun (1961), Gleason (1962), Vatuk (1964), Clivio (1966), Singh (1971), Bhatia (1975, 1993), Grainger (1980), Tolstaya (1981), Sandhu (1986), Dulai (1989), Malik (1995), Shackle (2003), Dhillon (2010), Bowden (2012), Kanwal & Ritchart (2015), Hussain (2015, 2017, 2019), Bhardwaj (2016), Evans (2018),Hussain, Qandeel, (2020) “Punjabi (India and Pakistan) – Language Snapshot”, Language Documentation and Description 19, 144-153. doi: https://doi.org/10.25894/ldd71. Retrieved on 3 September 2026 from: https://www.lddjournal.org/article/id/1239/ Chanchal Singh, Baldev Singh Cheema, Paramjit Singh Sidhu, Kanwaljit Kaur, G. K. S. Sekhon, Ved Agnihotri, Buta Singh, Paramjit Singh Walia, Sukhwinder Sangha, Narinder Dulai, Ujjal Singh Bahri, Christopher Shackle, Motia Bhatia, Sita Ram Bahri, O. N. Koul, S. S. Joshi, Madhu Bala, Khokhlova and B. R. Gupta. Furthermore, studies were sponsored by educational and government institutions, such as the Languages Department of Patiala. Harjeet Singh Gill and Henry Allan Gleason produced a pivotal reference grammar on the language, as a mimeograph in 1963 and it being published as a book later in 1969. For dialectal grammar, B. S. Sandhu created a descriptive grammar covering Puadhi while Janak Raj Sharma made one for Doabi. Joginder Singh Puar also published a work on Punjabi grammar, specifically on topics like verbs, passivisation, verbal phrases, and clauses. Chanchal Singh conducted research on syntax following Halliday's functional model. Punjabi Bhasha Academy published three volumes on Punjabi grammar for graduate studies. The Soviet linguist Yuri Andreyevich Smirnov published a work on Punjabi grammar in 1976 covering phonology, morphology, and syntax. Harkirat Singh was the first grammarist to adopt and apply Chomsky's method to Punjabi. Lakhvir Singh used Hudson's grammar model while Joga Singh opted for the G.B. model. Grainger (1980) was the first articulatory study on Punjabi using palatography. An acoustic and articulatory description of Punjabi consonants was carried out by Sandhu (1986). A study involving articulatory variation in the realization of dental and retroflex nasals using ultrasound-imaging was undertaken by Kochetov et al. (2019). Research on tonogenesis and acoustic/articulatory description of stop laryngeal and place contrasts in Punjabi is being carried out by Qandeel Hussain. Tej K. Bhatia published a work on the language's grammar in 1993. More recent grammars include Bhardwaj (2016) and Bashir & Conners (2019).
Various grammatical theories and models have yet to be applied to Punjabi in research. According to Kali Charan Bahl (2016), a proper grammatical study of Punjabi is yet to be undertaken, with him stating: Scientific study of dialectal phonology has mostly been conducted on eastern Punjabi varieties, such as by scholars Jain (1934), Arun (1961), Gill and Gleason (1962), Singh (1971), Dulai and Koul (1980), Bhatia (1993), Malik (1995), Shackle (2003), and Dhillon (2010). A few scholars who have researched the phonology of western Punjabi varieties include the likes of Bahri (1962) and Baart (2003, 2014). A recent Pakistani author in the field is Safdar Ali Shah, who wrote a work covering Shahmukhi Punjabi in Pakistan. Hussain (2020) covers Lyallpuri dialect's phonology in-depth.Hussain, Qandeel, Michael Proctor, Mark Harvey, and Katherine Demuth. 2020. “Punjabi (Lyallpuri Variety).” Journal of the International Phonetic Association 50(2): 282–97. doi: 10.1017/S0025100319000021. Retrieved on 4 September 2026 from: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-the-international-phonetic-association/article/punjabi-lyallpuri-variety/060E3FF5B0BF9E3226545BBA7C59D7EC Bashir & Conners (2019) covers Pakistani Punjabi. A grammar checking system has been developed for Punjabi.Mandeep Singh Gill and Gurpreet Singh Lehal. 2008. A grammar checking system for Punjabi. In 22nd International Conference on on Computational Linguistics: Demonstration Papers (COLING '08). Association for Computational Linguistics, USA, 149–152. Retrieved on 3 September 2026 from: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/1599288.1599290
Word order Punjabi is an SOV language, having a canonical word order of subject–object–verbGill, Harjeet Singh and Gleason Jr, Henry A. (1969). A Reference Grammar of Panjabi. Patiala: Department of Linguistics, Punjabi University and has postpositions, rather than prepositions. Wals.info
Transliteration In matters of script, Punjabi uses Gurmukhi and Shahmukhi. On this page, Punjabi is written in "standard orientalist" transcription as outlined in (with one change; representing ai /ɛː/ and au /ɔː/ with ē and ō respectively). Being "primarily a system of transliteration from the Indian scripts, [and] based in turn upon Sanskrit" (cf. IAST), these are its salient features: subscript dots for retroflex consonants; macrons for etymologically, contrastively long vowels; h denoting aspirated plosives. Tildes denote nasalized vowels, and grave and acute accents denote low and high tones, respectively.
Vowels and consonants are outlined in the tables below. The vowel table shows the character used in the article (ī) followed by its IPA value in forward slashes (ex. /iː/). See Punjabi phonology for further clarification.