The Islamic Republic of Pakistan is a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic and multi-lingual state located in South Asia, a part of the Indian sub-continent. With a population in excess of 180,000,000 people, Pakistan is the world’s sixth largest nation and its citizens, between them, speak more than sixty languages, ranging from those spoken by tens of millions of people to those whose speakers number just a few thousands.

Pakistan is a former British colony and, as is the case in most former British possessions, English is the official language of the country; the language in which government business is conducted. However, this official language is spoken on a regular basis by only a small proportion of the nation’s population, i.e. the ruling elite. In the pursuance of their day to day affairs, the average Pakistani speaks one or another of the many non-English languages.

Urdu is one of the larger languages spoken in the country, and it can be considered as being perhaps as near to a national language as any on the grounds that it is the language that is spoken in Karachi, Pakistan’s largest metropolitan area and a former national capital, and its environs. But, it should be kept in mind that this national language serves as the primary language for just about 15 million folk, i.e. just over 7 percent of the country’s population. Even in Sind Province, where Karachi is located, more people, i.e. more than 24 million people, or over 13 percent of the national population, speak Sindhi as their primary language rather than Urdu.

Of all the languages spoken in the country, the largest is Punjabi, the chief language of Punjab Province. More than 76 million folk speak Punjabi as their primary language, i.e. some 42 percent of the country’s population.

The other major languages that are spoken in Pakistan are Pashto which is spoken in the North West Frontier Province (along the country’s borders with Afghanistan, in which country Pashto is also a major language) by some 26 million people, i.e. just under 15 percent of the population; Seraki, which is the primary language of some 18 million folk, i.e. 10 percent of the population, in southern Punjab; and Balochi which is the primary language of Baluchistan Province, and is spoken by some 6 million people or 3.5 percent of the population.

Other than these major languages, the country boasts scores of additional languages including, but not restricted to, Balti, Gujarati, Kashmiri, Wakhi, Khowar, Potwari, Ormuri, Pahari, etc. Together, these languages are spoken by some 8 or so million folk, i.e. less than 5 percent of the population and between them they range from those languages which have hundreds of thousands of speakers down to those, some of which are teetering on the brink of extinction, that have just a few hundreds or thousands of speakers.

Most of the languages spoken in Pakistan, including English, are members of the Indo European family of languages, a group of closely related languages spoken in large areas of Asia and most of Europe, although the non-English Pakistani languages are part of the Indo-Iranian branch of the group whilst English is from the European branch. There are exceptions to this general rule. Balti, for instance, is a member of the Sino-Tibetan family of languages, a group of languages spoken over large parts of Asia along the China-Tibet-Myanmar axis, whilst Brahui is a member of the Dravidian family, a group of languages spoken by the earlier inhabitants of the Indian sub-continent before Indo-European speakers overran the sub-continent and became the dominant groups. Burushaki is an isolate language, something akin to Basque in Europe, in that it is yet to be determined which language family it is a member of.