A border runs through the middle of the Punjabi speaking world, and the writing changed on either side of it. On one side Punjabi is written in Gurmukhi, left to right. On the other it is written in a Perso-Arabic script, right to left. Same words, same jokes, same idioms. Hand the two of them the same printed page and only one of them can read it, and the other one starts at the wrong end.
This is not a variety problem. The speech is the same. It is the reading that was divided.
Gurmukhi is the script of Punjabi in India. It is closely bound up with the Sikh scriptural tradition, and its name refers to the mouth of the Guru. Children learn it at school, hymns are printed in it, and it runs left to right.
On the other side of the border, Punjabi is written in a Perso-Arabic script, usually called Shahmukhi, and it runs right to left. It shares its letters with Urdu and Persian rather than with anything in India.
So the division is not in the language. Two Punjabi speakers can talk for an hour and find nothing strange in each other at all. It is only when something is written down that they discover they belong to different reading worlds.
A closely related version of this story, about the same region and the same partition of literacy, is told on the Urdu page and the Hindi page. Punjabi is the case where the two scripts carry one language rather than two, and where the direction of the page itself changes.
Captions come out in Gurmukhi, which is the script your guest reads if they were schooled in Indian Punjab or grew up in a Gurmukhi reading family abroad. Nothing to configure and nothing to think about.
We do not currently write Punjabi in Shahmukhi. A guest who reads that script will find our captions slow or unreadable. The spoken language is unaffected: it is the same Punjabi, and it reaches them normally through an earbud.
So the rule at the door is simple. If your Punjabi guest reads Gurmukhi, offer captions or a voice, whichever they prefer. If they read the Perso-Arabic script, offer the Punjabi voice and an earbud, and offer Urdu captions alongside it, because Urdu is very often the written language such a reader is most fluent in. Both can run in the same service at no extra cost.
Practical, and worth two minutes if Punjabi is going on the projector rather than only on phones.
Put a line of Punjabi on your screen for half a minute before the room fills. That is the whole test.
Six deliberately hard Danish lines went into every language at once, the way a real room runs, and nothing has been edited since. Three of the Punjabi ones are here.
ਖਤਨਾ ਸਰੀਰ ਉੱਤੇ ਬਾਹਰਲੀ ਨਹੀਂ, ਪਰ ਆਤਮਾ ਰਾਹੀਂ ਦਿਲ ਦੀ ਖਤਨਾ ਹੈ।
From the Danish Omskærelsen er ikke den ydre på kroppen, men hjertets omskærelse ved Ånden.
Read word for word, the Danish is about a surgical procedure. In Romans 2 it is a figure about the heart, and the argument only holds if the same word stands on both sides of it. The Punjabi keeps it twice, and hangs the second one on the heart, which is where Paul puts it.
ਉਹ ਕਹਿੰਦਾ ਹੈ ਕਿ ਸਰੀਰ ਦੇ ਕੰਮ ਸਾਫ਼ ਹਨ ਅਤੇ ਉਹ ਆਤਮਾ ਦੇ ਫਲ ਦੇ ਵਿਰੁੱਧ ਖੜ੍ਹੇ ਹਨ।
From the Danish Kødets gerninger er tydelige nok, siger han, og de står i modsætning til Åndens frugt.
The Danish word here literally means meat, the sort you buy from a butcher, and Galatians five is not about food. What arrived is the word for the body set against the fruit of the Spirit, which is the contrast Paul is actually drawing.
ਤੁਸੀਂ ਕਿਰਪਾ ਨਾਲ ਵਿਸ਼ਵਾਸ ਰਾਹੀਂ ਬਚਾਏ ਗਏ ਹੋ, ਅਤੇ ਇਹ ਤੁਹਾਡੇ ਆਪਣੇ ਤੋਂ ਨਹੀਂ, ਇਹ ਪਰਮੇਸ਼ੁਰ ਦਾ ਉਪਹਾਰ ਹੈ।
From the Danish Af nåde er I frelst ved tro, og det skyldes ikke jer selv, det er Guds gave.
Grace and saved, which generic tools turn into mercy and rescued. This landed on the church words, and it addressed the congregation in the respectful form of you rather than the familiar one, which is the register a verse is read in from the front.
Produced with no glossary and no preparation. If your congregation uses a particular Punjabi wording for names or key terms, put it into Keywords once and it is used exactly, every service.
This one surprises churches, and getting it right removes a great deal of awkwardness.
There is a Bible in Punjabi, and Punjabi Christians in India generally read it. But a very large share of Punjabi speaking Christians come from the Pakistani side, where Urdu is the language of school, print and church life. Many of them speak Punjabi at home every day and read their Bible in Urdu.
Which means the words that sound like scripture to them may be Urdu words, not Punjabi ones. Ask, rather than assuming that the language somebody speaks is the language their faith is furnished in. They are often not the same.
The practical answer is to run both and let the person choose. Punjabi as a voice, Urdu as captions, or the other way around. Every pass carries as many languages as your guests need, and nobody has to declare anything from the front.
And if somebody tells you the wording your church uses for a term is not the wording they know, that is not a complaint. It is the most useful thing anybody will say to you all month. Write it down and fix it once.
Punjabi is an Indo-Aryan language, and it does two things its relatives mostly do not.
Punjabi distinguishes words by pitch, which is rare in its family and unexpected to anybody who assumes the region works like Hindi. It matters for the voice rather than for the text, and it is one more reason not to hand a Punjabi speaker a near neighbour instead.
There is more than one way to say you, and the choice is not optional. A verse addressed to a congregation and a sentence addressed to a friend take different forms, and the wrong one is not a grammar slip. It is a tone of voice.
The action arrives at the end of the sentence. For live captions that is the whole difficulty: a system emitting words the moment it hears them produces a sentence with a hole in it. Ours waits for a complete unit of meaning and then sends that.
Three separate questions, and Punjabi answers yes to all three.
A visiting Punjabi preacher can speak Punjabi and the room follows in whatever languages it needs. One of the 81 languages that can be the source, not only a destination.
Gurmukhi on the phone your guest already carries, or on the screen at the front through MulingDisplay. One of 182 languages that can be read.
Two Punjabi voices, one man and one woman, through an ordinary earbud. One of 81 languages that can be listened to rather than read, and on this page the one that works for every reader regardless of script.
Your guest points a phone camera at a code on the welcome sheet and picks Punjabi. No account, no app to install, no card, and the listener screen is in Punjabi before they choose anything.
One earbud, not two. They keep an ear on the room, so they still hear the singing and the person beside them. For a guest who reads the other script, that single earbud is the entire difference between attending and following.
One of the largest and longest established South Asian language communities on the continent, arriving by several unrelated routes.
Punjabi speaking families have been in parts of Europe for generations, particularly in the United Kingdom, with substantial communities in Italy and elsewhere. Some households are in their third or fourth generation.
They are not one community. Sikh, Muslim and Christian Punjabis all speak the same language and have very different histories with it, and a church that treats Punjabi as a proxy for anything other than Punjabi will get it wrong.
Within one family the language can be unevenly distributed. A grandmother most comfortable only in Punjabi, an adult son who works entirely in the host language, and a younger generation who understand Punjabi perfectly and read it barely at all.
That last group is the argument for the voice. Somebody who speaks a language fluently and reads it slowly is not helped by captions. They are helped by hearing it.
Give them the Punjabi voice and an earbud, and offer Urdu captions alongside it. Our Punjabi captions are in Gurmukhi, which a Shahmukhi reader will find slow. The spoken language is identical and reaches them normally.
Only if the person tells you they would rather have it. Punjabi is its own language, not a variety of either, and offering a substitute says something about how much trouble they were worth. Running all three at once costs nothing extra, because language count is not a price lever here.
It will if the font covers it, and many system fonts do not. The letters hang from a bar across the top, so a caption band cropped tight cuts through the bar. Put a line up before the room fills and you will know in half a minute.
Yes. Punjabi can be the language coming off the stage, and everybody else receives it in their own language at the same moment. A visiting Punjabi preacher does not have to switch language to be understood by the room.
After that a single gathering is a Service Pass, a whole day is a Day Pass, and a whole week is a Week Pass. A pass does not expire, and it is not spent unless somebody actually listens.
Each has a page of its own, with a hook of its own. The rest of the 183 are a row in the table.
Nothing to install, no card, and your guest needs nothing but the phone already in their pocket and one earbud.