Suggestion received during LCSH Suggest-a-Thon week March 2018: “I work in a Canadian university with a large Indo-Canadian and International student Punjabi speaking population. They refer to their language as Punjabi as do most other mainstream literature and media. They are perplexed by our label of Panjabi. The heading was changed from Punjabi language to Panjabi language with a 450 from Eastern Panjabi. Not sure how Western Panjabi fits in to the hierarchy. Language reference books do define the language as Panjabi but general usage does not.”
Potential resources:
- Conversational Punjabi : situational conversations /|cPinderjeet K. Gill (ISBN 9789351136507)
- Punjabi dictionary & phrasebook / compiled by Manmohan Kaurand (ISBN 9780781813006)
Violet notes: I’m a little baffled why this change was made in 2012. I don’t know for sure, but I suspect in order to change it back we’ll likely need to find a resource that specifically talks about the two spellings and explicitly states that one is preferred/more heavily used than the other. (Either in print or online.) Anyone have anything like that?
Encyclopedia Britannica states:
Punjabi language, Punjabi also spelled Panjabi, one of the most widely spoken Indo-Aryan languages. The old British spelling “Punjabi” remains in more common general usage than the academically precise “Panjabi.”
I will see what else I can dig up.
Here’s an opinion article about why the correct spelling should be Panjab, not Punjab, based on word derivation. The comments section has comments showing how transliteration from Shahmukhi, Gurmukhi, and Urdu show it should be Punjab, along with listing several sources also showing Punjab as the preferred usage.
The URL helps…sorry: https://www.sikhnet.com/news/its-panjab-not-punjab-opinion