Punjabi

The Punjabis are the Indo-Aryan people of the Punjab, the land of five rivers. Their language, Punjabi, descends from the regional Prakrits; its earliest writings come from Nath yogis in the ninth century, and it carries the verse of Baba Farid. Unusual among Indo-Aryan tongues, Punjabi is a tonal language, written in the Gurmukhi script in the east and the Perso-Arabic Shahmukhi script in the west.

In 1337 the Punjab was a province of the Delhi Sultanate, whose governors already used its Persian name of five waters. The Mughal conquest of 1526 made Lahore one of the greatest cities of the empire, and it was in central Punjab that Guru Nanak founded Sikhism during the sixteenth century.

As Mughal power collapsed in the eighteenth century the countryside fell to rival Sikh warrior bands called misls, until Ranjit Singh united them and, taking Lahore in 1799, built the Sikh Empire over most of the region.