It's neither a Programming Language nor a Scripting Language, it's a Glue Language.

...sorry, just having a little fun. Now back to reality: Required reading for any Perl addict is perlintro, where it states the following:

What is Perl?
Perl is a general-purpose programming language originally developed for text manipulation and now used for a wide range of tasks including system administration, web development, network programming, GUI development, and more.

The language is intended to be practical (easy to use, efficient, complete) rather than beautiful (tiny, elegant, minimal). Its major features are that it's easy to use, supports both procedural and object-oriented (OO) programming, has powerful built-in support for text processing, and has one of the world's most impressive collections of third-party modules.

Different definitions of Perl are given in perl, perlfaq1 and no doubt other places. From this we can determine that Perl is different things to different people, but that lots of people think it's at least worth writing about.

perl, and perlfaq1 support this definition and further clarify, calling it "a high level programming language", among other things. I suppose the notion of Perl being a "scripting language" comes from its similarities to awk, sed, and shell script variants. Furthermore, programs written in Perl are frequently referred to as 'scripts', probably in part because the source code is readable by humans (a debatable point) and by the Perl interpreter, "on the fly". In other words, where C is compiled, then linked, and then the source code gets tossed out with the bathwater before product distribution, Perl programs (or scripts) remain in their script-like source format until the final moment before execution. ...and that final moment is pretty much invisible to the user. This rationale for the use of 'scripting language' when describing Perl is my own hypothesis, and I cannot cite a specific passage in scripture.