Do You Need to Communicate in Punjabi?
April 17, 2018
In recent years, the need to communicate in Chinese Mandarin has grown with China playing a major role in global business and worldwide trade. With a population of 1.38 billion, China has a massive human resource. However, India is now set to surpass China as the world's most populous country and sooner than many analyst previously thought. According to the most recent forecasts, India will have 1.5 billion people by 2030, whereas China's population is expected to remain stable with the possibility for small declines. In 2015, Punjabi (an Indo-Aryan language) was spoken by over 100 million native speakers worldwide, ranking as the 10th most widely spoken language globally.
Punjabi is a term that is used to identify ethnicity, race and language. Punjabis are people who reside or originated from the region of Punjab in northern India along the Pakistan border. Punjabi is also used to identify the language that grew out of this region. Today, the language is the most widely spoken in Pakistan accounting for more than 76 million Punjabi speakers. Moreover, the language spread to the North American continent over 130 years ago. In the United States, many Punjabi Americans had ancestors who settled in agricultural communities of California's Imperial Valley. Today, Punjabi Americans hold high-level state and federal political offices while others have founded important high technology businesses.
In neighboring Canada, four years after Punjabi became Canada's third most common language; it was also named as the third language for the Canadian Parliament after English and French. French is considered the mother tongue of 7.2 million Canadians that mostly live in Quebec, where French is the majority official language. English remains the primary language spoken by 56% of Canada's population. By contrast, there are more than 1/2 million Canadian speakers of Punjabi, which exceeds Spanish, Arabic and Tagalog (Philippine Islands) speakers. So, don't be surprised if your business or organization has a future need for Punjabi interpreters and translators.
