Saraiki

Punjabi and Saraiki share grammatical structure and many cognates, and Saraiki was historically classified under Punjabi by the British colonial census. Modern linguistic analysis treats them as separate languages with distinct verb conjugations, pronouns, and phonological inventories. Saraiki has implosive consonants Punjabi lacks, and the two are not fully mutually intelligible without exposure.

Saraiki has four phonemic implosives — voiced consonants made with an inward airstream that contrast with regular voiced stops. The pattern is shared with Sindhi (and rare in Indo-European more broadly), and reflects the geographic continuity of the Indus valley. Saraiki implosives are written with extra Perso-Arabic letters distinct from the corresponding plain stops.

Across the southern half of Punjab province in Pakistan (the Saraiki Belt — Multan, Bahawalpur, Dera Ghazi Khan, Rahim Yar Khan, Muzaffargarh, and surrounding districts), plus parts of northern Sindh, Balochistan, and southern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Diaspora populations exist in the Gulf, the United Kingdom, and North America. Movement for a separate Saraiki province within Pakistan has been politically active for decades.

Yes — most analyses identify three: masculine, feminine, and a third class sometimes treated as a separate gender or as a sub-class of feminine for certain inanimate nouns. The system is more elaborate than Punjabi's two-gender setup. Verbs, adjectives, and some postpositions agree, and the split-ergative past tense familiar from Hindi shows up in Saraiki too.

Some Saraiki varieties preserve lexical tone, similar to Punjabi — a result of the historical loss of voiced aspirated consonants leaving tonal traces on the surrounding vowels. Other Saraiki varieties have lost tone or never developed it strongly. The tone system is less elaborate than Punjabi's three-tone system in most descriptions.