4 ms·
Urdu is the native language of a very small number of Pakistanis, mostly the 3% of the population that descend from families that moved from India at independen
by barry-cotter 6y ago
Urdu is the native language of a very small number of Pakistanis, mostly the 3% of the population that descend from families that moved from India at independence, the Mojahirs. Punjabi and Sindhi are mother tongue to far more people.
- sdiq 6y agoMohajir, you seem to have the 'h' and 'j' interchanged.
- barry-cotter 6y agoI will remember.
- amingilani 6y agoPakistani here. While that is true, everyone speaks Urdu. If you have a regional language you can grow up speaking both languages fluently, or just one—depending on which you're more exposed to—and even English if you were educated in it. For example, my dad's regional language was Seraiki, and my mom's Punjabi, and they speak both and Urdu fluently. I grew up in an area where the regional language was Punjabi. But, I'm not as fluent in Punjabi or Seraiki as I am in Urdu. However, I've never had trouble using Urdu with someone in Pakistan, even if their regional language was Sindhi, Pashto or Hindko. Also, I don't know why if it's just me, but most regional languages sound very similar—I've had conversations where I spoke Urdu while the other person spoke in a regional language.
- nayaketo 6y agoI'm from Nepal and Urdu and Hindi sound similar to me. I can understand most Pakistanis pretty well, even though I only know Hindi.
- barry-cotter 6y agoYeah, apart from Brahui all the languages of Pakistan are Indo-Aryan or Baluch, which is closer to Persian (Farsi). Urdu is part of the Hindustani dialect continuum that stretches across the North of the Indian subcontinent. Speaking three of these languages is like speaking Spanish, Italian and Portugese. Standards are different, vocabulary will differ quite a lot. The intelligibility you speak of is in part the product of 70 years of tv, radio and education though. Smoothing out of dialectal differences. Hindi is the same in North India. Not surprising since Urdu and Hindi are pretty much the same language bar the writing system and scientific/technical/legal/formal vocabulary.
- abdullahkhalids 6y agoAs per the 1998 census, 7.6% of the population usually speaks Urdu in their household. http://www.pbs.gov.pk/sites/default/files/other/yearbook2007/population/16.20.pdf http://www.pbs.gov.pk/sites/default/files/other/yearbook2007...
- barry-cotter 6y agoI’m sure there are plenty of people who aren’t Mohajirs who speak Urdu at home but a lot of those people are going to be making a political statement more than one that a linguist would agree with. You see the same shading of reality in Ireland where 10% of the population say they speak Irish weekly or in Ukraine where the number of people who said they were native speakers of Ukrainian rather than Russian jumped dramatically after the Russian invasion.
- abdullahkhalids 6y agoI understand what you are saying, but I think a likelier explanation is that a small percentage of the population of modern day Pakistan were already Urdu speakers before partition. I am open to changing my mind or confirming my theory, given empirical evidence.
- selimthegrim 6y agoTo give you an example, listen to Waseem Akhtar criticizing Ch. Nisar. https://youtu.be/qeXlgNZTcmA https://youtu.be/qeXlgNZTcmA You can tell by his grammar that his family belongs to UP.