Punjabi names

This page documents the use of Punjabi language labels with name=*. There are two writing systems in widespread use for the language, Gurmukhi, which may be tagged with name:pa=*, and Shahmukhi, which may be tagged with name:pnb=*. The documentation here is intended to provide information broadly relevant for using both of these keys.

How to map

Gurmukhi-Shahmukhi transliteration

The following letters have a 1:1 correspondence. If a name is entirely comprised of them, and the short vowels are known, they may be converted easily in both directions.

Gurmukhi	Shahmukhi	ISO 15919
ਟ	ٹ
ਠ	ٹھ
ਰ	ر
ਰ੍ਹ	رھ

Tips for non-Punjabi speakers

It may not be obvious to someone unfamiliar with Arabic-based scripts, but in adding Punjabi labels for a place with a native label in Arabic for example, the original text cannot necessarily be copied to name:pnb=* (or vice versa) and be legible. There are a number of alphabet and spelling convention differences that prevent this from being possible.

Punjabi versions of non-Punjabi place names are not necessarily one-to-one transliterations, rather, they tend to be a combination of phonological adaptations and conformity to the common lexicon. For example, Baltimore in Punjabi is بالٹیمور / ਬਾਲਟੀਮੋਰ pronounced exactly like the word for bucket "balti" بالٹی ਬਾਲਟੀ.

Pronunciation

name:iso15919=* is in more widespread use for other languages such as Kannada at the moment, but the ISO 15919 system for Romanized phonetic transcription of Indic languages may be useful for Punjabi as well. This is very similar to the also widely used IAST system, though notably ISO 15919 adds provisions for most of the features of Punjabi which cannot be described using IAST. ISO 15919 does not include provisions for transcribing tone, but the de facto convention in any Romanized transcription system is to use the combining accent markers seen on à and á for high and low tone respectively, and to ommit an accent marker on level tone vowels.

In conjunction with the conventions attested in Urdu dictionaries, vocalised forms of names may be written in Shahmukhi using combining diacritics. At the time of writing, this is not known to have been tagged on OpenStreetMap, but a "vocalised name" property exists on Wikidata which is usable across languages which have transcription features of this kind. A vocalised name includes more than just the diacritics which might be added occasionally for word disambiguation. For example, for the name of Bathinda, in Indian Punjab:

• Common spelling: بٹھنڈا
• Vocalised spelling: بَٹھِن٘ڈا

Grammar

Proper nouns in Punjabi tend not to differ much from common nouns in how they function. Like any other nouns in the language, place names have grammatical gender and inflections for case marking. Recording these details could be useful for constructing more sophisticated directions for routing, or matching place names in strings. Existing tags are in relatively widespread use for reflecting the grammatical properties of place names in some languages, for example name:dative=* and name:genitive=* are used to document case marking in Polish toponyms.

The "default" or most commonly attested form of a name would be the direct case form. When followed by a postposition, a noun takes on the oblique case form. All nouns in the language have these two forms, but a notable minority have additional case forms. The two that are prevalent for Punjabi toponyms are the locative case forms, used for indicating "in" or "on" places, and ablative case forms, used for indicating "from" places. These latter two categories do not occur for every name, and should only be documented if attested and known to be in use.

Related languages

Punjabi is largely used in contexts where diglossia is prevalent—that is, speakers of the language typically use an additional language alongside their mother tongue. In this case, Hindustani (Urdu/Hindi) functions as a "prestige" register and lingua franca in Pakistan and India. It can be expected that name:ur=* will be identical to name:pnb=* in most instances. These are of course different languages, but given that Punjabi speakers constitute the largest proportion of Urdu users in Pakistan, there is typically no reason why a Punjabi name would have a different Urdu name. (That the original name is Punjabi is typically still apparent, as place names often are derived from common vocabulary.)

Punjabi also forms a dialect continuum with a number of closely related languages. What this means is that for each of these "neighbour" languages, there are a certain number of people who may consider their dialect to be one of Punjabi and others who consider it a distinct language. At some point, at the periphery of the Punjab region, the common languages become something other than Punjabi, but to draw exactly where that line lies would not be possible. Notable languagea which have this relationship with Punjabi are Saraiki, Hindko, Dogri, Gujari, and Bagri. Each have their own pronounciation tendencies reflected in differences in writing. In many cases, the name in these languages will be distinct but very similar, in many others the names would be identical.