10 mother tongues in Pakistan
Pakistan is a multilingual country with many languages, but here we will discuss 10 languages spoken as mother tongues.
1: Urdu: Urdu is the national language of Pakistan, spoken among people whose mother tongue is different. It is the language used commonly among people everywhere in schools,offices ,shopping malls etc .Urdu is spoken throughout Pakistan.
2: Balochi: Balochi is the language of the Baloch ethnic group in Pakistan; it is spoken as the first language by about 3% of Pakistanis, mostly in the province of Balochistan. Syed Zahoor Shah Hashmi is a writer and is considered an important figure in Balochi literature.
3: Brahui: Brahui is spoken mainly in one of the provinces of Pakistan known as Balochistan and is the first language of an ethnic group called Brahui. The language is also called the same as the ethnic group.
4: Hindko: This language is mostly spoken in Hazara division, Peshawar, and Potohar. Hindko speakers are referred to as Pathans (an ethnic group with Pashto language) by some academics, probably because of the many Pashtun tribes.
5: Kohistani: It is spoken in the former Kohistan district of Pakistan. Kohistan means ‘something from the mountainous land’.
6: Khowar: Khowar is spoken in Chitral and surrounding areas in Pakistan. The ethnic group that speaks it is called Chitrali; it is also spoken in India and Afghanistan.
7: Punjabi: Punjabi is the native language of more than 30% of the population of Pakistan. It is the 9th most spoken language in the world and is also spoken in India.
8: Pashto: The Pashto language in historical Persian literature is known as the Afghani. It is the language of an ethnic group called the Pathans. It is also one of the two official languages of Afghanistan, alongside Dari. Pashto is the primary language of the Pashtun diaspora around the world. Speakers of this language are estimated as 40 million, or sometimes 60 million.
9: Sindhi: Sindhi is the language of an ethnic group called Sindhi. Approximately 24 million people speak this language across at least nine different regions.
10: Saraiki: The Saraiki language was previously known as Multani,after its main dialect. This language has partial mutual intelligibility with standard Punjabi.
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