[6] It is spoken by 28.84 million people, as per the 2023 Pakistani census, taking prevalence in Southern Punjab with remants in Northern Sindh and the Derajat region.

[7] This term was first introduced for the Multani, Riyasti and Derawali dialects of the Punjabi language in 1962 as a result of a political movement.

Saraiki has partial mutual intelligibility with Standard Punjabi,[9] and it shares with it a large portion of its vocabulary and morphology.

At the same time in its phonology it is radically different[10] (particularly in the lack of tones, the preservation of the voiced aspirates and the development of implosive consonants), and has important grammatical features in common with the Sindhi language spoken to the south.

[6] According to Pakistani politicians such as Hanif Ramay and Fakhar Zaman, the Saraiki linguistic seperatist movement was thought to have been pushed by feudal landowners of the Seraiki belt.

[12]Due to effects of dominant languages in Pakistani media like Urdu, Standard Punjabi and English and religious impact of Arabic and Persian, Saraiki like other regional varieties of Pakistan are continuously expanding its vocabulary base with loan words.

[14] It has been in use for much longer in Sindh to refer to the speech of the immigrants from the north, principally Siraiki-speaking Baloch tribes who settled there between the 16th and the 19th centuries.

[17] An alternative hypothesis is that Sarākī originated in the word sauvīrā, or Sauvira,[18] an ancient kingdom which was also mentioned in the Sanskrit epic Mahabharata.

[27] Grierson also maintained that "Lahnda" was his novel designation for various dialects up to then called "Western Punjabi", spoken north, west, and south of Lahore.

Spoken in Upper Sindh as well as the southern Panjab, it is sometimes considered a dialect of either Sindhi or of Panjabi due to a high degree of mutual intelligibility.

One historical name for Saraiki, Jaṭki, means "of the Jaṭṭs", a northern South Asian ethnic group.

In the context of South Asia, the choice between the appellations "language" and "dialect" is a difficult one, and any distinction made using these terms is obscured by their ambiguity.

To the west, it is set off from the Pashto- and Balochi-speaking areas by the Suleiman Range, while to the south-east the Thar desert divides it from the Marwari language.

Its other boundaries are less well-defined: Punjabi is spoken to the east; Sindhi is found to the south, after the border with Sindh province; to the north, the southern edge of the Salt Range is the rough divide with the northern varieties of Lahnda, such as Pothwari.

[44] After Partition in 1947, Hindu and Sikh speakers of Saraiki migrated to India, where they are currently widely dispersed, though with more significant pockets in the states of Punjab, Haryana, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Delhi and Jammu and Kashmir.

[60] Of the nasals, only /n/ and /m/ are found at the start of a word, but in other phonetic environments there is a full set of contrasts in the place of articulation: /ŋ ɲ ɳ n m/.

[67] Unusually for South Asian languages, implosive consonants are found in Sindhi, possibly some Rajasthani dialects,[68] and Saraiki, which has the following series: /ɓ ᶑ ʄ ɠ/.

[71][72] The retroflex implosive alternates with the plain voiced dental stop /d/ in the genitive postposition/suffix /da/, which takes the form of /ᶑa/ when combined with 1st or 2nd person pronouns: /meᶑa/ 'my', /teᶑa/ 'your'.

Their source has generally been the older language's series of plain voiced stops, thus Sanskrit janayati > Saraiki ʄəɲən 'be born'.

Later authors have noted their existence in Multani and have variously called them "recursives" or "injectives", while Grierson incorrectly treated them as "double consonants".

[79] In the province of Punjab, Saraiki is written using the Arabic-derived Urdu alphabet with the addition of seven diacritically modified letters to represent the implosives and the extra nasals.

[86] The language, partly codified during the British Raj, derived its emotional attraction from the poetry of the Sufi saint, Khawaja Ghulam Farid, who has become an identity symbol.

The beloved's intense glances call for blood The dark hair wildly flows The Kohl of the eyes is fiercely black And slays the lovers with no excuse My appearance in ruins, I sit and wait While the beloved has settled in Malheer I feel the sting of the cruel dart My heart the, abode of pain and grief A life of tears, I have led Farid Shakir Shujabadi (Kalam-e-Shakir, Khuda Janey, Shakir Diyan Ghazlan, Peelay Patr, Munafqan Tu Khuda Bachaway, and Shakir De Dohray are his famous books) is a very well recognized modern poet.

[89] Former Pakistan Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gillani had said southern Punjab is rich in cultural heritage which needs to be promoted for next generations.

In a message on the launch of Saraiki channel by Pakistan Television (PTV) in Multan, he is reported to have said that the step would help promote the rich heritage of 'Saraiki Belt'.