File:Majority first language by district in Pakistan as of the 1998 census.png

The templates used to make this map can be found here.

The source for the data used in the creation of this file can be found here (must be accessed through Google Earth or another application which opens .SHP files). All the data is adjusted for 2020 district borders.

The image was created with Gimp and a calculator.

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Pakistan is a land of many languages, with estimates on just how many ranging from between 70 to 90. While Urdu is Pakistan's national language and lingua franca, and while the majority of Pakistanis speak Urdu as a second language, only 7.57% of the country's population natively spoke Urdu in 1998. The other 92.43% of the country speaks a multitude of other languages, with Punjabi, Pashto, Sindhi, and Saraiki all having more native speakers than Urdu.

In the 1998 census of Pakistan, a question was asked about the participants' first languages. There were seven possible answers to this question: Punjabi, Pashto, Sindhi, Saraiki, Urdu, Balochi/Brahui (while Balochi and Brahui are two very different languages they were lumped together due to the fact that nearly all native speakers of Brahui grow up speaking Balochi and are fluent in Balochi), and Other. This map primarily uses data from the 1998 census, except in the case of the districts where Hindko, Kohistani, and Khowar are spoken. In the census data, these languages were all cast in the "Other" category, but luckily the ranges of these three languages are well-defined, well-documented, and well-known.

With the 2017 census, a few changes were made to the list of choices given as separate languages. Hindko and Kashmiri were classified as separate languages (with their speakers being in the "Other" category earlier) and a separate category for the Brahui language was added as the Balochi/Brahui category was split up to two different categories: Balochi and Brahui.

This map uses 1998 data because district-wise language data for the 2017 census has not been made available yet (as of December 2020).

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Footnotes:

• Pahari-Pothwari, although considered by many to be a language in its own right, is not shown on this map because the majority of people living in the areas where Pahari-Pothwari is spoken chose Punjabi instead of "Other" when responding to the census' language question.

• While Hindko and Saraiki are often considered dialects of Punjabi, they are differentiated on this map because the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics considers Punjabi and Saraiki separate, and speakers of Hindko overwhelmingly marked "Other" as their language in the 1998 census instead of Punjabi.

• Despite Brahui and Balochi being two very different languages, respondents who spoke these languages were placed in the same category in the 1998 census.

• The figures used are approximations based on census data because Hindko, Kohistani, and Khowar all were placed in the "Other" category in the 1998 census.

• No majority means no mother tongue had a share of the population in this district higher than 50%.

• Language data has not been been made available publicly for Azad Jammu & Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan for the 1998 census.