Common Linguistic Patterns in Punjabi and Persian Sufi Literature

Abstract

Sufism has exceptionally augmented the various perspectives of physical, intellectual and spiritual domains. This piece of research purports to inquire about the common patterns that emerge in the Sufi literature of Punjabi and Persian language. The data have been amassed from 25 poems of two Punjabi Sufi poets, Baba Bulleh Shah and Shah Hussain, and 2 Persian Sufi poets Sultan Bahu and Mulana Jalaluddin Rumi. Speech act theory provides the theoretical framework to this study and stylistic analysis has been employed in order to canvass the data. The findings of this piece of research unveil that the employment of figurative language, structural practices, deixis, speech acts, implicature, presupposition, binaries, and references (anaphoric, cataphoric, and exophoric) are the common linguistic patterns used by Punjabi and Persian Sufi poets in their oeuvres to encode imperceptible mystical realities. It is anticipated that the study would make worthwhile benefaction in the ontogeny of research apropos the genre of Sufi literature in other languages.