Punjabi voice over services

Punjabi is spoken across the Punjab region on both sides of the India–Pakistan border, and it is written in two entirely different scripts. In Indian Punjab it uses Gurmukhi, left to right. In Pakistani Punjab it uses Shahmukhi, a Perso-Arabic script written right to left. These are not two styles of the same alphabet: a reader of one does not read the other.

For anything with text attached — a subtitle, a caption, an on-screen title, the script itself — that is the first decision, and it comes before any conversation about voice. Tell us which side of the border your audience is on and the deliverable follows from there.

The second thing that makes Punjabi unusual is that it is tonal. Unlike most Indo-Aryan languages, it developed lexical tone, so the pitch of a syllable can change which word you have said. A non-native actor approximating the accent flattens those tones, and a Punjabi listener registers the result as wrong long before they could explain what went wrong. It is the clearest technical reason to cast native here.

Punjabi is also a British audience language, not only an export one — at the 2021 census it was the third most common main language in England and Wales, with around 291,000 speakers. That community came overwhelmingly from Indian Punjab, which is a useful shortcut: for a UK campaign, Gurmukhi and the Indian variety are normally the right default rather than an open question.

Typical work is public-information and health campaigns, corporate video and internal communications, eLearning and compliance training, advertising for Punjab and for UK Punjabi audiences, banking and remittance content, and broadcast and OTT material produced for Punjabi-speaking viewers.