Draft talk:Western Punjabi

Article scope

What is this article about? The lead defines it as the Pakistani standard of Punjabi (this is a variety of "Eastern Punjabi", and has so far been treated within the article Punjabi language). But then the infobox, as well as the rest of the article, set out a much larger scope that seems to most closely correspond to the extent of Ethnologue's Lahnda macrolanguage. Well, we already have an article at Lahnda, a well-defined, if controversial, linguistic grouping. However, the difference in Ethologue's treatment is that it tacks onto this group what it infelicitously calls "Western Punjabi" (code "pnb"), a construct encompassing the (mostly non-Lanhda) varieties of Pakistan whose speakers identify as Punjabi. There's no basis in the current literature for such a wide grouping (not counting the extreme ethno-nationalist view that all the Lahnda varieties are simply dialects of Punjabi). The closest thing is the expectation current in the fist couple of years after Partition that all the Lahnda and Punjabi varieties that have found themselves within Pakistan would converge into a single language. That was a reasonable expectation at the time, but it has not materialised.

So, this article could reasonably be redefined to be either about Lanhda, in which case it would duplicate an existing article, or about the Pakistani variety (or varieties) of Punjabi, in which case it would be a subtopic of Punjabi language and would be better off redirecting there until there's enough content to split off into a separate article. – Uanfala (talk) 20:18, 30 January 2021 (UTC)