Highlighting the Sound Shift in Punjabi Language: A Corpus-Based Descriptive Study

Punjabi language is most widely spoken language of Pakistan (Abbas, Chohan, Ahmed, & Kaleem, 2016). Punjabi is under developed language because of which, upcoming generations are shifting to other technically and digitally developed languages such as Urdu and English. In result of which, the sound shift is being observed in Punjabi language. Sounds which used to be present in the past in Punjabi language are found missing now. This leads to a problematic situation that this sound shift may result in language extinction and sound loss. This study is about the sound change and it has been studied in Punjabi language. On the basis of observation of speech in surrounding, researcher made a hypothesis that those speakers of Punjabi language who acquired Punjabi as L1 are able to produce few distinctive sounds that are not produced by the speakers who acquired Urdu as a mother tongue. For this purpose, a corpus of 2 million words was collected and the words including the sounds |n|ن  and |l| ل were particularly shortlisted from the corpus. The speakers from both origins were asked to pronounce these words, the hypothesis was proved and, in result, variations in the pronunciation of sounds were observed. Sociolinguists and Phonologists need to heed on this issue to save Punjabi language from extinction

Towards a Unicode Compatible Punjabi Character Set

International audienceThis paper discusses additions to the Arabic script for the representation of the Punjabi language. This adaptation of the Arabic script is called the "Shahmukhi" writing system which is one of the two writing systems of the Punjabi language, the other being Gurmukhi. To begin with, the representation of the Punjabi language in the two scripts is compared. Characteristics of different characters i.e. letters, special symbols, diacritical marks, digits etc, are analyzed. Based on this analysis a new character set is proposed, which is capable of fully representing Punjabi in Shahmukhi. A comparison of this set with Unicode is undertaken to identify missing characters. Inclusion of these characters is proposed with a view to make Shahmukhi compatible with the Unicode standard

Text Summarization Technique for Punjabi Language Using Neural Networks

In the contemporary world, utilization of digital content has risen exponentially. For example, newspaper and web articles, status updates, advertisements etc. have become an integral part of our daily routine. Thus, there is a need to build an automated system to summarize such large documents of text in order to save time and effort. Although, there are summarizers for languages such as English since the work has started in the 1950s and at present has led it up to a matured stage but there are several languages that still need special attention such as Punjabi language. The Punjabi language is highly rich in morphological structure as compared to English and other foreign languages. In this work, we provide three phase extractive summarization methodology using neural networks. It induces compendious summary of Punjabi single text document. The methodology incorporates pre-processing phase that cleans the text; processing phase that extracts statistical and linguistic features; and classification phase. The classification based neural network applies an activation function- sigmoid and weighted error reduction-gradient descent optimization to generate the resultant output summary. The proposed summarization system is applied over monolingual Punjabi text corpus from Indian languages corpora initiative phase-II. The precision, recall and F-measure are achieved as 90.0%, 89.28% an 89.65% respectively which is reasonably good in comparison to the performance of other existing Indian languages" summarizers.This research is partially funded by the Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness, Spain (CSO2017-86747-R)

Highlighting the Sound Shift in Punjabi Language: A Corpus-Based Descriptive Study

Punjabi language is most widely spoken language of Pakistan (Abbas, Chohan, Ahmed, & Kaleem, 2016). Punjabi is under developed language because of which, upcoming generations are shifting to other technically and digitally developed languages such as Urdu and English. In result of which, the sound shift is being observed in Punjabi language. Sounds which used to be present in the past in Punjabi language are found missing now. This leads to a problematic situation that this sound shift may result in language extinction and sound loss. This study is about the sound change and it has been studied in Punjabi language. On the basis of observation of speech in surrounding, researcher made a hypothesis that those speakers of Punjabi language who acquired Punjabi as L1 are able to produce few distinctive sounds that are not produced by the speakers who acquired Urdu as a mother tongue. For this purpose, a corpus of 2 million words was collected and the words including the sounds |n|ن and |l| ل were particularly shortlisted from the corpus. The speakers from both origins were asked to pronounce these words, the hypothesis was proved and, in result, variations in the pronunciation of sounds were observed. Sociolinguists and Phonologists need to heed on this issue to save Punjabi language from extinction

Of subalterns and Sammi trees: echoes of Ghadar in the Punjabi literary movement

This paper explores how Ghadar’s legacy is interpreted by the Punjabi literary movement in Punjab, Pakistan. Putting Ghadar’s poetry into conversation with the work of these contemporary activists sheds light on unexplored facets of both. It unveils how these writers and thespians invoke Ghadar to subvert the narrow discourse of “Punjabiyat” and ethno-nationalist identity, and allows us to appreciate the politics of language that underpinned Ghadar di Goonj. The intertwining of these histories of literary dissent raises key questions for debates around radical literature and progressive writing in South Asia, by highlighting the role of vernaculars in reading subaltern consciousness and native traditions of revolt.

Subject mapping of Punjabi language books: a bibliometric study

251-256The study presents the subject analysis of Punjabi language books written in ‘Gurmukhi’ script from 2004-2013 covering different fields of arts and humanities, social sciences, science, engineering, and technology. The distribution of major subjects and their subdivisions were based on the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) 22nd edition. The information centres, and academic institutions such as universities from the different parts of Northern India, having a good collection of Punjabi language books were the focus for data collection. The Punjabi language books publishers and several websites/resources were also consulted to get the required information. A total number of 7997 Punjabi books on different subjects published during the period 2004-2013 have been studied. The largest number of books in Punjabi [5587 (69.9%)] is published in the field of literature. Subject analysis, decadal growth, analysis of books translations from different Indic and foreign languages to the Punjabi language are also included in the study. A growth rate of 29.37% in the publication of Punjabi books is seen during the decade

Subject mapping of Punjabi language books: a bibliometric study

The study presents the subject analysis of Punjabi language books written in ‘Gurmukhi’ script from 2004-2013 covering different fields of arts and humanities, social sciences, science, engineering, and technology. The distribution of major subjects and their subdivisions were based on the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) 22nd edition. The information centres, and academic institutions such as universities from the different parts of Northern India, having a good collection of Punjabi language books were the focus for data collection. The Punjabi language books publishers and several websites/resources were also consulted to get the required information. A total number of 7997 Punjabi books on different subjects published during the period 2004-2013 have been studied. The largest number of books in Punjabi [5587 (69.9%)] is published in the field of literature.Subject analysis, decadal growth, analysis of books translations from different Indic and foreign languages to the Punjabi language are also included in the study. A growth rate of 29.37% in the publication of Punjabi books is seen during the decade

Science Literature in Indian Languages: A Study of Punjabi Language

The context of this paper is to find out the status of science (and technology) literature being published in Indian languages. Science can reach masses only if it’s in their mother tongue. Indian languages are rich repositories of scientific knowledge, although terminologically these have not matched the developments in European languages. The paper focusses on scientific literature in Punjabi language (Gurmukhi script). A descriptive approach is used, followed by brief analysis of the situation. In spite of efforts by various agencies such as the Commission for Scientific and Technical Terminology, Government of India; the Languages Department, Government of Punjab; Punjab Agricultural University; Punjabi University; and Punjab State Council for Science and Technology; there are only a few publications only on science in Punjabi language from the public sector institutions. Many others, such as leading Punjabi language newspapers regularly carry articles and other information on science. Increasing number of science resources in Punjabi are also being made available on the Internet. A brief list of such resources is provided in the paper along with suggestions for improving the situation