Languages Spoken in Pakistan: Urdu, Punjabi and More

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The 2023 Pakistan Bureau of Statistics census placed Punjabi as the mother tongue of 37 percent of the country, Pashto at 18.15 percent, Sindhi at 14.31 percent, Saraiki at 12 percent, and Urdu, the national language, at 9.25 percent. Pakistan is home to between 70 and 80 languages in total, with these five plus Balochi and Hindko covering the vast majority of the roughly 240 million population and a long tail of smaller mountain and desert languages adding further variety. Pakistan’s linguistic map reflects centuries of migration, conquest, and trade across the Indus Valley, the northern mountains, and the Arabian Sea coast, the same forces that shaped the wider Pakistani culture picture. This article walks through the major and minor languages spoken in Pakistan today, the 2023 census numbers, the provincial breakdowns, the trend lines from 1998 onward, and the small mountain languages that face extinction inside a generation.

Major Languages of Pakistan: 2023 Census Numbers

Punjabi: 88.92 million speakers, 36.98 percent of the population, mainly Punjab province, no official status
Pashto: 43.63 million speakers, 18.15 percent, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and northern Balochistan, large Karachi diaspora
Sindhi: 34.40 million speakers, 14.31 percent, official language of Sindh province
Saraiki: 28.85 million speakers, 12 percent, southern Punjab including Multan and Bahawalpur divisions
Urdu: 22.25 million first-language speakers, 9.25 percent, national official language and lingua franca
Balochi: around 7 million speakers, Balochistan province, Iranian branch of Indo-European
Hindko: 3 to 4 million speakers, Hazara division of northern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa
English: co-official language for government, courts, military, universities
Mountain languages: Shina around 1 million, Khowar around 300,000, Burushaski around 100,000 (a language isolate), Kalasha under 5,000

Urdu and English as Official Languages

Urdu is the national language of Pakistan and shares official status with English in government, the courts, and the federal administration. The 2023 census recorded 22.25 million Pakistanis with Urdu as their first language, up from around 7 percent in the 1998 census, with most concentrated in urban Sindh, above all in Karachi, where the descendants of Muslim migrants from northern India who arrived after the 1947 Partition still use Urdu as their home language. Urdu is taught in primary and secondary schools across all provinces and serves as the lingua franca of internal communication in a country with several major regional language communities.

Urdu belongs to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European family. The language shares most of its core grammar and a large pool of inherited vocabulary with Hindi spoken in northern India. The split between the two written forms came in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when Urdu adopted a modified Perso-Arabic script and absorbed a heavy layer of Persian and Arabic vocabulary, while Hindi developed in the Devanagari script with a Sanskrit-derived vocabulary register.

English has been the working language of higher administration, the higher courts, the armed forces, and the major universities since the British colonial period. The Constitution of Pakistan and most federal laws are written in English. English-medium education remains the standard at the more selective private schools and universities, while government schools use Urdu as the medium of instruction with English as a subject.

Article 251 of the 1973 Constitution names Urdu as the national language and requires the state to arrange for its use in all official functions within 15 years of the constitution coming into force. In September 2015, the Supreme Court of Pakistan ordered the federal and provincial governments to implement Urdu immediately, issuing nine guidelines covering translation of policies and rules into Urdu within three months, signage at courts and public offices, and Urdu content in utility bills, passports, driving licences, and election commission documents. Implementation has been slow. Federal court reports submitted in the years that followed showed limited progress, and English has continued in practice as the language of higher administration.

Punjabi and Saraiki in Punjab Province

Punjabi is the most spoken language in Pakistan by mother tongue, with 88.92 million speakers across the eastern Punjab province and parts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Sindh, and Azad Kashmir. The dominant dialect is Majhi, centred on the Lahore area, although the language has several distinct regional varieties. Punjabi belongs to the Indo-Aryan branch and is written in Pakistan in a modified Perso-Arabic script called Shahmukhi, which differs from the Gurmukhi script used by Sikh and Hindu Punjabis on the Indian side of the border.

Punjabi has a long literary tradition that includes the Sufi poetry of Bulleh Shah, Waris Shah, and Sultan Bahu, and the folk romance of Heer Ranjha by Waris Shah remains the best-known classical work in the language; the same literary world feeds the recitation tradition that shapes Pakistani wedding traditions in Punjab. Despite being the most spoken language in the country, Punjabi has no official status in Pakistan and is not used as the medium of instruction in any government school system.

Saraiki is the related Indo-Aryan language of southern Punjab, the Bahawalpur and Multan divisions, and parts of northern Sindh and Balochistan. The 2023 census recorded 28.85 million Saraiki speakers, or 12 percent of the population, making it the fourth-largest language in Pakistan ahead of Urdu by raw speaker count. Saraiki has been classified for decades as a Punjabi dialect by some linguists and as a distinct language by others. The dialect view points to mutual intelligibility with Punjabi and shared core vocabulary. The language view points to a more complex tense and aspect system, distinctive auxiliary verbs, split ergativity that does not appear in standard Punjabi, and a separate literary tradition.

The Saraiki movement has campaigned for several decades to have the language officially recognised as separate from Punjabi rather than as a southern dialect, with parallel demands for a Saraiki province carved from southern Punjab. The 2023 census recorded Saraiki under its own category rather than rolling it into Punjabi, an administrative recognition that fell short of formal legal status. Saraiki publishing today includes newspapers, books, modern poetry, and a growing television presence based in Multan and Bahawalpur.

Pashto in the Northwest and Karachi

Pashto is the main language of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the former Federally Administered Tribal Areas now merged into the province, and the northern districts of Balochistan that border Afghanistan. The 2023 census recorded 43.63 million Pashto speakers, 18.15 percent of the population, making it the second most spoken provincial language after Punjabi. Karachi, on the southern coast and far from the Pashto heartland, holds the single largest urban concentration of Pashto speakers anywhere through decades of internal migration from the northwest in search of work and refugee movements from Afghanistan since the 1980s.

Pashto is also the main language of southern and eastern Afghanistan, where it shares official status with Dari Persian, and most Pashto media and literature has circulated across the border between the two countries. The language belongs to the Iranian branch of the Indo-European family rather than to the Indo-Aryan branch that includes Urdu, Punjabi, and Sindhi. It is written in a modified Perso-Arabic script with several extra letters for sounds the standard Arabic script lacks.

Pashto has a strong literary tradition that includes the seventeenth-century poetry of Khushal Khan Khattak and the eighteenth-century Sufi poetry of Rahman Baba, both of whom remain in regular recitation today. Modern Pashto television, radio, music, and print publishing in Pakistan operate from Peshawar and from Karachi, alongside the broader traditional Pakistani fashion and craft worlds that have their own regional centres.

Sindhi and Balochi in the Southwest

Sindhi is the official language of the province of Sindh and the first language of 34.40 million Pakistanis, 14.31 percent of the national population by the 2023 census. Sindhi belongs to the Indo-Aryan branch and is written in a modified Perso-Arabic script with extra letters added in the nineteenth century to capture sounds the standard Arabic script does not have. The language has a long literary tradition that runs through the eighteenth-century poetry of Shah Abdul Latif Bhitai, whose Shah Jo Risalo remains the central Sindhi literary text and is still read at his shrine in Bhit Shah.

Sindhi is the medium of instruction in many government schools in rural Sindh, although Urdu and English remain dominant in Karachi and in the more selective urban schools. The 2023 census recorded 22.3 percent of Sindh province speaking Urdu as a first language, mainly concentrated in Karachi, with Sindhi at around 60 percent of the provincial population overall.

Balochi is the main language of Balochistan, the largest province by area although the smallest by population, and is the first language of around 7 million people in Pakistan, with smaller communities in southern Afghanistan and south-eastern Iran. Balochi belongs to the Iranian branch and shares its closest linguistic ties with Kurdish and the other northwestern Iranian languages rather than with the surrounding Indo-Aryan languages. The language has a strong oral tradition of epic poetry and folk narrative but a shorter written tradition, with no single standard script. Modern Balochi publishing uses a modified Perso-Arabic script. Within Balochistan province itself, the 2023 census showed Balochi at 39.91 percent and Pashto at 34.3 percent, the two languages roughly co-dominant across the province.

Provincial Linguistic Breakdown

The 2023 census reported language by province, which gives a sharper picture than the national averages alone. The provincial picture explains why a Karachi shopkeeper and a Peshawar trader rarely share a first language and rely on Urdu as the bridge.

Province	Dominant language	Share	Second largest	Share
Punjab	Punjabi	67%	Saraiki	20.6%
Sindh	Sindhi	60%	Urdu	22.3%
Khyber Pakhtunkhwa	Pashto	81%	Hindko	9.39%
Balochistan	Balochi	39.91%	Pashto	34.3%

Islamabad Capital Territory and Gilgit-Baltistan have their own mixed profiles. Islamabad runs Urdu-dominant for first-language use because of migration from across the country, with Punjabi and Pashto as the next two. Gilgit-Baltistan reports Shina as the largest single language at around 40 percent of the territory, with Balti, Khowar, Burushaski, and Wakhi sharing the rest.

Census Trends from 1998 to 2023

Pakistan has run three full national censuses since 1998 that recorded language at the household level. The trends across the three rounds show two clear movements: Punjabi share declining as Urdu and Pashto rise, and Saraiki holding its position once it gained a separate census category.

Language	1998	2017	2023
Punjabi	44.15%	38.78%	36.98%
Pashto	15.42%	18.24%	18.15%
Sindhi	14.10%	14.57%	14.31%
Saraiki	10.53%	12.19%	12.00%
Urdu	7.57%	7.08%	9.25%
Balochi	3.57%	3.02%	3.40%

The Punjabi decline of roughly seven percentage points across 25 years tracks both demographic shifts and household reporting changes. Punjabi families in urban centres increasingly report Urdu as the home language for one or more children. The Urdu rise from 7.57 percent to 9.25 percent picks up internal migration toward Karachi, Lahore, and Islamabad, where second-generation households often shift from a regional mother tongue to Urdu. Pashto’s growth between 1998 and 2017 reflects both higher fertility rates in Pashto-speaking regions and the formal inclusion of merged tribal districts in census coverage.

Smaller Languages of the Northern Mountains

The mountain valleys of Gilgit-Baltistan and the upper reaches of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa hold a striking concentration of small language communities, several of which are not close relatives of the dominant languages of the lowlands. Shina is spoken by around 600,000 to 1 million people across Gilgit, Diamer, and Astore districts and parts of Indus Kohistan. The language belongs to the Dardic group of Indo-Aryan languages and has several distinct regional dialects.

Burushaski, spoken by around 100,000 people in the Hunza, Yasin, and Nagar valleys of upper Gilgit-Baltistan, is a language isolate with no proven genetic relationship to any other language family in the world. The language has resisted classification for more than a century of linguistic study. Khowar, the language of the Chitral valley in northern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, has around 300,000 speakers and belongs to the Dardic group.

Kalasha, spoken by the Kalash people of three valleys in southern Chitral, has under 5,000 speakers and is the language of the only non-Muslim indigenous community in Pakistan. Wakhi is spoken by a few thousand people in the upper Hunza valley near the Wakhan corridor and belongs to the Iranian branch. Balti, a Sino-Tibetan language related to Ladakhi and Tibetan, is spoken by around 400,000 people in Skardu and the Baltistan division. Kashmiri is spoken by around 4 million people in the Pakistan-administered Azad Kashmir region, with most speakers also fluent in Urdu. Hindko, the language of the Hazara division of northern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, has 3 to 4 million speakers and is treated as a Punjabi dialect by some linguists and a separate Indo-Aryan language by others.

Endangered Languages of Pakistan

UNESCO and the Encyclopaedia of the World’s Endangered Languages have flagged more than two dozen Pakistani languages as endangered or seriously endangered. Most sit in the northern mountains and the Hindu Kush border valleys, where small communities of a few hundred to a few thousand speakers face pressure from Pashto, Urdu, and the regional dominant languages.

Domaaki: around 350 speakers in the Hunza and Nagar valleys, used by the Dom community of musicians and blacksmiths, severely endangered
Ushojo: under 2,000 speakers in the Bishigram valley of Swat, no written tradition
Badeshi: a handful of elderly speakers in upper Swat, considered functionally extinct by some researchers
Gawarbati: around 9,000 speakers in the Chitral border valleys, Dardic branch
Yidgha: around 6,000 speakers in the Lutkoh valley of Chitral, Pamir Iranian branch
Ormuri: around 1,000 speakers in Kaniguram in South Waziristan, Iranian branch
Kalasha: under 5,000 speakers, with the small Kalash community holding both the language and the only non-Muslim indigenous religious tradition
Torwali: around 80,000 speakers in upper Swat, Dardic branch, recent revitalisation efforts at the Idara Baraye Taleem-o-Taraqqi school
Mankiali, Bateri, Chilliso, Gawro, Gawri, Indus Kohistani, Palula: each spoken by a few hundred to a few thousand people in the Indus Kohistan and northern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa valleys

Several common threats run through these communities. Pakistan’s national censuses do not record any of these languages as separate categories, which keeps them invisible to state policy. Schooling in Urdu and Pashto from the early grades replaces home-language use within two generations. Out-migration for work in lowland cities breaks the chain of children growing up with the language. Several research groups, including the Forum for Language Initiatives in Islamabad and university linguistics departments in Karachi and Peshawar, have run documentation projects since the early 2000s, recording vocabulary, grammar sketches, and oral literature before the last fluent speakers die.

Religious and Historical Languages

Several languages live in Pakistan as religious or historical rather than everyday spoken languages. Arabic is the language of the Quran and of formal Islamic prayer for most Pakistani Muslims, and basic Arabic literacy is taught in religious schools called madrasas and in many state primary schools as part of the Islamiat curriculum. Few Pakistanis speak Arabic as a conversational language, although the script is recognised across the country because it forms the basis of the modified scripts used to write Urdu, Punjabi, Sindhi, Pashto, and Balochi.

Persian was the court and administrative language of the Mughal empire until the British replaced it with English in the nineteenth century, and it remained a literary and educational language for Muslim elites in the subcontinent into the twentieth century. Persian vocabulary still runs through Urdu, Punjabi, and the other Indo-Aryan languages of Pakistan in the form of loanwords for poetry, governance, and culture. A small community of refugees from Afghanistan and Tajikistan in Pakistan still speaks Dari Persian as a home language. Sanskrit served as a religious and literary language for the Hindu communities of the region before Partition, although it now has only a marginal presence among the small remaining Hindu populations of Sindh.

Frequently Asked Questions

What language do they speak in Pakistan?

The official languages of Pakistan are Urdu and English. Urdu is the national language and lingua franca, while English is the working language of government, courts, and universities. By the 2023 census, the most spoken first language by number of speakers is Punjabi at 88.92 million (37 percent), followed by Pashto at 43.63 million (18 percent) and Sindhi at 34.40 million (14 percent).

How many languages are spoken in Pakistan?

Estimates range between 70 and 80 languages spoken across Pakistan today, including the two official languages Urdu and English, the major provincial languages Punjabi, Pashto, Sindhi, Balochi, Saraiki, and Hindko, and a long tail of smaller languages concentrated in the northern mountains and the western border valleys. More than two dozen are classified as endangered.

What is the official language of Pakistan?

Pakistan has two official languages: Urdu and English. Urdu is the national language and the most common medium of internal communication. English remains the working language of higher administration, the higher courts, the armed forces, and the major universities. The 2015 Supreme Court order requiring full Urdu implementation has been only partly carried out.

Which is the most spoken language in Pakistan?

Punjabi is the most spoken first language in Pakistan with 88.92 million speakers by the 2023 census, 37 percent of the national population, although it does not hold official status. Pashto is the second most spoken language with 43.63 million speakers, followed by Sindhi with 34.40 million.

Is Saraiki a separate language or a Punjabi dialect?

The question is contested. The 2023 Pakistani census records Saraiki under its own category with 28.85 million speakers, an administrative recognition that falls short of formal legal status as a separate national language. Linguists who classify Saraiki as a distinct language point to a more complex tense and aspect system, distinctive auxiliary verbs, split ergativity not present in standard Punjabi, and a separate literary tradition based in Multan and Bahawalpur. Linguists who treat it as a Punjabi dialect point to high mutual intelligibility and shared core vocabulary.

Is Hindi spoken in Pakistan?

Hindi as a separate written language is not common in Pakistan, although Urdu and Hindi share most of their core grammar and a large pool of inherited vocabulary, which makes spoken Hindi from across the border largely intelligible to Urdu speakers. The two were treated as a single language called Hindustani in the colonial period before Partition.

Languages Spoken In Pakistan