Image: Distribution of Pakistanis speaking Urdu as a first language in 1998

Description: This map shows the percentage of people in each district of Pakistan who spoke Urdu as their mother tongue at the time of the 1998 census. 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. --- Urdu is a Central Indo-Aryan language that is the official national language of Pakistan and is one of India's many constitutionally recognized official languages. It is spoken by approximately 70 million people worldwide natively. Urdu is Pakistan's lingua franca, and while only 7% of Pakistanis speak Urdu natively, most Pakistanis understand Urdu and speak it as a second language. In 1998, Urdu was spoken by 7.57% of Pakistanis as a first language (10.02 million). 21% of the population of Sindh, 10% of the population of Islamabad, 4.5% of the population of Punjab, 0.97% of the population of Balochistan, and 0.69% of the population of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa spoke Urdu natively in 1998. By 2017, the share of Pakistanis claiming Urdu as their mother tongue had fallen to 7.08% (14.71 million). 18% of the population of Sindh, 12% of the population of Islamabad, 4.9% of the population of Punjab, 0.84% of the population of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and 0.81% of the population of Balochistan spoke Urdu natively in 2017.
Title: Distribution of Pakistanis speaking Urdu as a first language in 1998
Credit: Own work
Author: Abdullah Ali Abbasi
Usage Terms: Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
License: CC BY-SA 4.0
License Link: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
Attribution Required?: Yes