Pakistan's national language is Urdu and its official language is English, but neither is the mother tongue of most Pakistanis. The most widely spoken first language is Punjabi, spoken by about 37 per cent of the population in the 2023 census, followed by Pashto (about 18 per cent), Sindhi (about 14 per cent), Saraiki (about 12 per cent) and Urdu (about 9 per cent). More than 70 languages are spoken in the country in all. In practice, most Pakistanis speak a regional language at home, use Urdu as the common language between regions, and meet English in government, the courts, business and higher education.
| Mother tongue | Share (2023 census, approx.) | Main region |
|---|---|---|
| Punjabi | ~37% | Punjab |
| Pashto | ~18% | Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, northern Balochistan |
| Sindhi | ~14% | Sindh |
| Saraiki | ~12% | Southern Punjab |
| Urdu | ~9% | Karachi and other cities |
| Balochi | ~3% | Balochistan |
| Hindko, Brahui and others | ~7% | Various |
Why Urdu Became the National Language
Urdu takes its name from the Turkic word ordu, an army camp, the same root as the English word "horde". It developed in northern India from the Hindustani spoken around Delhi, enriched with Persian and Arabic vocabulary during Mughal rule. By the nineteenth century it had become the literary language of north Indian Muslims, the language of poets such as Ghalib and, later, of Muhammad Iqbal, whom Pakistan regards as its national poet. When Pakistan was created in 1947, its leaders chose Urdu as the national language because it belonged to no single province and symbolised the Muslim identity on which the new state was founded. Even the national anthem, adopted in 1954, is written in a highly Persianised Urdu, and almost every word in it is also a Persian word.
That choice made Urdu a language of migrants. Its native speakers in Pakistan are mostly the Muhajirs, families who moved from India at Partition, and their descendants, concentrated in Karachi and Hyderabad. More native speakers of Urdu actually live in India than in Pakistan. Everywhere else in Pakistan, Urdu is learned as a second language, but it is learned very widely, through school, television, film and pop music, so that almost every Pakistani can use it.
Spoken Urdu is mutually intelligible with everyday Hindi. The two are standardised forms of the same Hindustani base. They differ most in their formal vocabulary, Urdu borrowing from Persian and Arabic and Hindi from Sanskrit, and in their scripts. Urdu is written right to left in a flowing Perso-Arabic calligraphic style called Nastaliq, Hindi in Devanagari.
The Language Dispute That Split the Country
The choice of Urdu had its most serious consequence in East Pakistan, the eastern wing that later became Bangladesh, where more people spoke Bengali than spoke any other language in the whole country. In March 1948 Muhammad Ali Jinnah told a crowd in Dhaka that Urdu, "and no other language", would be the state language. Protests followed, and on 21 February 1952 police in Dhaka opened fire on students demonstrating for Bengali, killing several. Bengali was made a second state language in the 1956 constitution, but the grievance fed the movement that led to Bangladesh's independence in 1971. UNESCO now marks 21 February as International Mother Language Day. The story continues in our guide to the language spoken in Bangladesh.
Language politics caused conflict in Sindh too. In 1972 the provincial assembly made Sindhi the official language of the province alongside Urdu, and riots broke out between Sindhi and Urdu speakers. Pakistan's constitution now allows provinces to promote their own languages in addition to Urdu.
English: The Language of Power
English, inherited from British rule, remains the working language of the state. Laws are drafted in it, the Supreme Court and high courts use it, and senior civil servants and army officers work in it. The 1973 constitution said Urdu should replace English for official purposes within fifteen years. That deadline passed without change, and in 2015 the Supreme Court ordered the government to implement Urdu as the official language. Progress has been slow. English also divides Pakistani society: fluency usually comes from expensive private schools, and it opens doors to university, government and professional careers that are much harder to reach without it.
Switching Languages in a Single Sentence
In daily life, many Pakistanis move between languages within a single conversation. A family in Lahore may speak Punjabi at home, switch to Urdu with a shopkeeper from another province, and mix English words and whole phrases into both, a blend often jokingly called "Urdish". Office conversation is frequently a mixture of Urdu grammar and English vocabulary.
The internet has added a new script. On phones and social media, most people type Urdu in Latin letters, known as Roman Urdu, rather than in Nastaliq, so "thank you" in Urdu might be typed shukriya. Urdu television is also one of Pakistan's cultural exports. Pakistani drama serials such as Humsafar, first shown in 2011, have large audiences in India, the Gulf and the diaspora, and they spread the Urdu of Karachi and Lahore well beyond Pakistan.
Punjabi: The Largest Language With the Least Status
Punjabi is Pakistan's largest mother tongue, but it has no official status even in Punjab, where Urdu and English are used in schools and government. It is written in Pakistan in Shahmukhi, a version of the Perso-Arabic script, while Sikhs across the border in India write it in Gurmukhi. Punjabi has a rich tradition of Sufi poetry. Bulleh Shah and Waris Shah, whose version of the love story Heer Ranjha is still recited, are among its best-known poets. Punjabi also thrives in film and music, above all in the devotional Sufi music called qawwali, made famous worldwide by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan.
Saraiki, spoken in southern Punjab around Multan and Bahawalpur, is closely related. Many of its speakers regard it as a separate language, and since the census first recorded it separately, in 1981, its recognition has fed a political campaign for a separate Saraiki province.
Pashto, Sindhi and Balochi
Pashto, the language of the Pashtun people, is spoken across Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and northern Balochistan, and across the border in Afghanistan, where it is an official language. Pakistan has more Pashto speakers than Afghanistan does. It uses a Perso-Arabic script with extra letters for sounds that Arabic and Persian lack, and it has a strong oral poetic tradition going back to Khushal Khan Khattak and Rahman Baba.
Sindhi is the language of the lower Indus. It has its own extended Arabic-based alphabet of 52 letters, standardised under British rule in the 1850s, and a literary tradition centred on the eighteenth-century Sufi poet Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai, whose shrine at Bhit Shah still draws large crowds. Balochi, an Iranian language, is spoken across Balochistan and neighbouring parts of Iran and Afghanistan. In the same province lives a very different language, Brahui, which belongs to the Dravidian family of southern India, more than 1,500 km away. How it came to be spoken in Balochistan is still debated.
A Visitor's First Words
Visitors can get a long way with a little Urdu, which is understood almost everywhere. The standard greeting is assalam-o-alaikum, "peace be upon you", answered with wa-alaikum-assalam. Shukriya means "thank you", ji added to a word or name makes it polite, and ji haan means a respectful "yes". Urdu also has three forms of "you": aap for elders, strangers and anyone owed respect, tum for friends and equals, and tu for close intimates or to be rude. Visitors should always use aap, even with people younger than themselves.
Pakistan's Languages Abroad
Millions of Pakistanis live abroad, and they have taken their languages with them. In the United Kingdom, whose large Pakistani community came mainly from Mirpur in Azad Kashmir and from Punjab, Punjabi and Urdu are among the most commonly spoken languages after English. Pahari-Pothwari, the dialect of Mirpur, is widely spoken in cities such as Bradford and Birmingham. In the Gulf states, several million Pakistani workers form one of the largest foreign communities, and Urdu is commonly heard in the markets of Dubai. Across the border in India, Urdu is also an official language in several states, including Jammu and Kashmir, Telangana and Uttar Pradesh, which is one reason Bollywood songs so often use Urdu poetry.
The Mountain Languages of the North
The mountains of Gilgit-Baltistan and northern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa hold Pakistan's greatest language diversity. Shina is spoken around Gilgit, and Khowar in Chitral. Balti, spoken in Skardu, is a Tibetan language written historically in Tibetan script. Wakhi, an Iranian language, is spoken in the upper Hunza and in the Wakhan Corridor of Afghanistan. Most remarkable of all is Burushaski, spoken by about 100,000 people in the Hunza, Nagar and Yasin valleys. It is a language isolate, unrelated to any other known language on Earth, and it survived because the high valleys where it is spoken were isolated for so long. Several of the smaller northern languages have only a few thousand speakers and are considered endangered. Pakistan's language map spreads across borders in every direction, as our list of countries where Urdu is spoken shows.