Demographics
At independence there was a Muslim majority in West Punjab with significant minorities of Hindus and Sikhs. Nearly all of these minorities fled West Punjab for India, to be replaced by large numbers of Muslims leaving in the opposite direction. The official language of West Punjab was Urdu but most of the population spoke Punjabi using the Shahmukhi script. The linguist George Abraham Grierson in his multivolume Linguistic Survey of India (1904–1928) considered the various dialects up to then called "Western Punjabi", spoken in North, West, and South of Lahore in what is now Pakistani Punjab, as constituting instead a distinct language from Punjabi. (The local dialect of Lahore is the Majhi dialect of Punjabi, which has long been the basis of standard literary Punjabi.) Grierson proposed to name this putative language "Lahnda", and he dubbed as "Southern Lahnda" the coherent dialect cluster now known as Saraiki spoken in Multan Dera Ghazi Khan and Bahawalpur division and "North Lahnda" now known as Potwari spoken in Rawalpindi division and "Western Lahnda" now known as Hindko spoken in the regions bordering Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa.
Read more about this topic: West Punjab