Languages of Pakistan

Languages of Pakistan
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Pakistan has two official languages: Urdu (which is also the national language) and English. In addition there are six major provincial languages: Punjabi, Pashto, Saraiki, Sindhi, Kashmiri and Balochi.

These and almost all of the other languages spoken in Pakistan belong to the Indo-Iranic language group. Some have a speaking population of hundreds of thousands, while others have only a few thousand or a few hundred speakers. These languages have been in contact with each other for many centuries, with a lot of borrowing, so the distinction between language and dialect is not sharply drawn, resulting in a complex language situation.
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History

Urdu was chosen as a national language of Pakistan to act as a lingua franca amongst the various ethnic/cultural groups and has historical significance as the language developed during the Islamic conquests in the subcontinent during the Mughal Empire. It was chosen as the neutral language to unite various groups of Pakistan although only 8% of people in Pakistan speak Urdu as a first language. However, Urdu is, increasingly, being adopted and spoken as a first language by a new generation of urbanized Pakistanis.

Many regional languages are spoken in Pakistan and the major ones according to the number of native speakers are Punjabi (44%), Pashto (15%), Sindhi (14%), Saraiki (10%), Baluchi (4%). Pakistan has about 1 million native speakers of Persian. Persian continues to be an important literary language in Pakistan. Arabic is popular due to religious significance. Most Pakistanis understand at least two languages. ​

Demographics

Pakistan has about 99% of languages spoken are in the Indo-Iranian (sub-branches: 75% of the Indo-Aryan and 24% Iranian), a branch of Indo-European family of languages. All languages of Pakistan are written in the Perso-Arabic script, with significant vocabulary derived from Arabic and Persian. Punjabi, Saraiki, Sindhi, Pashto (Iranian), Urdu, Balochi (Iranian), Kashmiri (Dardic/eastern Iranian), etc., are the languages spoken in Pakistan. In the case of Urdu/Hindi, while Hindi is the mother-tongue of 40% of the population in the Republic of India, Urdu is the mother-tongue of only 8% Pakistanis. Urdu and Hindi are considered by most linguists to be the same language; differing only in script, and formal vocabulary; in which Urdu favours words of Perso-Arabic origin whereas Hindi tends to use Sanskrit words. Colloquial Hindi and Urdu, however, are completely indistinguishable - and as such, were referred to as Hindustani in all of India before the 1947 partition.
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