Punjabi is the most widely-spoken first language in Pakistan, with 80.5 million native speakers according to the 2017 census, and the 11th most widely-spoken in India, with 31.1 million native speakers, according to the 2011 census. It is spoken among a significant overseas diaspora, particularly in Canada, the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia, and the Gulf states.
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^80.5 million in Pakistan (2017), 31.1 in India (2011), 0.5 in Canada (2016), 0.3 in the UK (2011), 0.3 in the US (2017), 0.1 in Australia (2016). See § Geographic distribution below.
^Haldar, Gopal (2000). Languages of India. New Delhi: National Book Trust, India. p. 149. ISBN9788123729367. The age of Old Punjabi: up to 1600 A.D. […] It is said that evidence of Old Punjabi can be found in the Granth Sahib.
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^Christopher Shackle; Arvind Mandair (2013). "0.2.1 – Form". Teachings of the Sikh Gurus : selections from the Scriptures (First ed.). Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. ISBN9781136451089. Surpassing them all in the frequent subtlety of his linguistic choices, including the use of dialect forms as well as of frequent loanwords from Sanskrit and Persian, Guru Nanak combined this poetic language of the Sants with his native Old Punjabi. It is this mixture of Old Punjabi and Old Hindi which constitutes the core idiom of all the earlier Gurus.
^Frawley, William (2003). International encyclopedia of linguistics (2nd ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 423. ISBN9780195139778.
^Austin, Peter (2008). One thousand languages : living, endangered, and lost. Berkeley: University of California Press. p. 115. ISBN9780520255609.
^Braj B. Kachru; Yamuna Kachru; S. N. Sridhar (2008). Language in South Asia. Cambridge University Press. p. 411. ISBN9781139465502.