Languages of Pakistan
| Languages of Pakistan | |
|---|---|
| Official languages | Urdu and English (to be removed) |
| National languages | Urdu |
| Main languages | Punjabi (44%), Pashto (15%), Sindhi (12%), Saraiki (11%) Urdu (8%), Balochi (3.6%) |
| Main immigrant languages | Arabic, Dari, Bengali, Gujarati, Memoni |
| Sign languages | Indo-Pakistani Sign Language |
| Common keyboard layouts |
|
Pakistan's national language is Urdu, which, along with English, is also the official language. In 2015, the government of Pakistan announced plans to make Urdu the sole official language and abolish English as the second official language. The country is also home to several regional languages, including Punjabi, Saraiki, Pashto, Sindhi, Balochi, Kashmiri, Hindko, Brahui, Shina, Balti, Khowar, Dhatki, Marwari, Wakhi and Burushaski. From among these, four (Punjabi, Pashto, Sindhi, and Balochi) are provincial languages.
Almost all of Pakistan's languages belong to the Indo-Iranian group of the Indo-European language family.
Following are the major languages spoken in Pakistan, by number of people that speak them as their first language.
Urdu (اردو) is the national language (قومی زبان), lingua franca and one of two official languages of Pakistan (the other currently being English). Although only about 8% of Pakistanis speak it as their first language, it is widely spoken and understood as a second language by the vast majority of Pakistanis and is being adopted increasingly as a first language by urbanized Pakistanis. It was introduced as the lingua franca upon the capitulation and annexation of Sindh (1843) and Punjab (1849) with the subsequent ban on the use of Persian. According to the linguistic historian Tariq Rahman, however, the oldest name of what is now called Urdu is Hindustani or Hindvi and it existed in some form at least from the 14th century if not earlier (Rahman 2011). It was probably the Indo-Aryan language of the area around Delhi that absorbed words of Persian, Arabic, and Chagatai (a Turkic language)—in a process like the one that created modern English. This language, according to Rahman, is the ancestor of both modern Hindi and Urdu. These became two distinct varieties when Urdu was first Persianized in the 18th century and then Hindi was Sanskritized from 1802 onwards.
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