A Comparative Linguistic Sketch of Sindhi and Persian Languages

Abstract

Sindhi and Persian belong to two different branches, i.e., Indo-Iranian and Indo-Aryan, of the Indo-European language family. Persian has long historical, political, cultural, and linguistic contact with Sindhi in Sindh. It has remained prevalent during different periods, in administration, judiciary, education, literature, and other domains. Persian has had historical linguistic contact with various South Asian languages ​​such as Urdu, Hindi, Punjabi, Saraiki, Pashto, Balochi, and Bengali, as well as Sindhi. Along with linguistic contact, political, cultural, and literary relations have a long history. The period, from the rule of the Ghaznavid dynasty in Sindh (1026 AD) to the early period of the British era (1843 AD - 1853 AD), and then the establishment of Pakistan, Urdu is directly or indirectly related to it, covering almost nine centuries. This research paper presents a brief comparative linguistic sketch of Persian and Sindhi languages. The purpose of the study was to highlight the linguistic commonalities and differences between the two languages. Hope, the native Sindhi speakers, especially students of different levels, will be the prime beneficiaries of this study. For this study, the content analysis method was applied to written linguistic structures, i.e., phonetic sketch, descriptive morphology, syntax, and lexicon of the two languages. Analytical results clearly reveal that the two languages, with resulting historical language contact and interference, have many linguistic similarities. Whereas they exhibit differences, too. In conclusion, in Persian and Sindhi, the amount of linguistic similarity and difference is almost the same.

Keywords: Sindhi, Farsi, Comparative Linguistics, Phonetics, Morphology, Syntax, Language Contact, Interference.