Panjabi language Standardisation
Panjabi severely needs a proper standardisation to be able to survive. It is a major language in brutw numbers, but its unstandardised in Pakistan and has no future if we don't intervene. The Standard Panjabi in India is also a mockery of our language and forces Hindustanisation.
We know that the State of Pakistan will never do anything for us, so its up to us (and mostly the Panjab-oriented intellectuals) to engage in this. I spent some time reading about it and I think Norway and Finland represent the best examples for us Panjabis and our language. They both faced similar problems to us and fixed them.
Norway had a problem back in the day where the elite's language was either Danish or Danish influenced. So, Ivar Aasen rejected it and constructed Nynorsk by synthesizing the most conservative, rural western dialects, intentionally seeking out older grammatical forms to create a "pure" Norwegian. IF, we are to go this way, we already have Jatki/Jangli in Panjab. It is a highly conservative dialect, and we can elevate it, coin new modern terms and formally standardise it similar to Norway. It will also bypass the current centre of Lahore and damage Majhi's hegemony (which currently acts as the go-to dialect when someone thinks of Panjabi, but its becoming very Urdu-influenced in Lahore, a problem similar to how Norwegian Nationalists saw their language). A Panjabi board (non-governmental, a volunteer org) could study the conservative dialects of the Bar regions (Jatki/Jangli, Shahpuri) and create a new High Register from them. The only issue is that this approach would be Purist to the point that maybe some orthodox Muslims would oppose it, not sure. We'll have to aggressively purge Urdu and Perso-Arabic loanwords while also avoiding Tatsamas. My main problem is that the Nynorsk model created an Ausbau language (a language separated by development) that is distinct from the dominant state language. It guarantees immense friction. By disenfranchising Majha, we'll run into Norway's problem which is still divided between Bokmål and Nynorsk today. If we do this, we'll have to avoid a permanent schism between the Majha Region and the newly register.
Finland instead combined different dialects together. Finnish linguists took the existing Western dialect's literary standard and grafted Eastern vocabulary and morphology onto it to placate Eastern nationalists. They had genuine fear of their nation splitting hence the compromise. If we are to do this, we could combine the major dialects of Pakistani Panjab (Majhi, Multani, Hindko, Jatki etc) into a Taksali varient. How that will be done is something that should be left to actual experts and intellectuals who may ever get involved in this. But it could look something like taking Majhi as the structural base but heavily altering it to accommodate the Lehnda continuums to prevent them from breaking away into separate linguistic identities. Majhi remains the core structural framework, maintaining its analytic grammar and postpositions. Also, the Finns used Eastern folklore to justify injecting Eastern words into the standard, we could utilize the classical Sufi poetry (which heavily features Lehnda dialects, like the works of Khwaja Farid or Bulleh Shah) to justify injecting Multani and Jatki vocabulary into standard Majhi. The hardest part though is that this involved a lot of intellectual weight from Finnish people in an era called Romantic Nationalism. The Finnish people got tired of foreign languages taking precedence in their own homelands and aggressively started to standardise their own language without any government support. One Finnish Nationalist even went to all corners of the land to collect all epics and folktales to create a Finnish historical myth. They changed their names en masse to native Finnish names and also started to affect how religious was in their region. How well that will go for Panjab? Idk, risky. Plus, they also built a world-class education system afterwards to make sure their setup doesn't flop and their language continues to this day.
One last thing, this process would likely create an Institutional Diglossia like in most cases where people speak the Formal Varient in official settings, in schools and their books are written in it, their education system and their official media as well as their scientific literature. But people at home and in their localities continue speaking their own dialects. I actually think that's a better idea, we get to keep our diversity and also build a formal standard for our language.