Languages of India and Pakistan

Many different languages are spoken in India and Pakistan, some of which are shared between the two countries, and others which are not. Some languages can be regarded as dialects of others, but others are completely different languages which cannot be understood by each others' speakers.

The most commonly understood lingua franca between the countries are Hindi and English, spread by Hindi movies and the British colonial presence respectively. Hindi movies often intersperse Hindi dialogue with English phrases or whole sentences in English.

India

Hindi, in the Devanagari script, is the only official federal language of India.

Individual states and territories have adopted 14 other co-official languages. These are the Dravidian languages of Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, and Telugu, and the Indo-Aryan languages of Bengali, Marathi, Urdu, Gujarati, Oriya, Punjabi, Assamese, Kashmiri, Sindhi and Sanskrit.

Many other languages belonging to both groups are spoken as well. English, though only an associate language, is still widely in use in law and government, in particular in the higher echelons.

See Demographics of India for a numerical breakdown of language groups.

Pakistan

Urdu, Sindhi and English are the official languages of Pakistan, and English is the lingua franca of the Pakistani elite and most government ministries.

Urdu is closely related to Hindi but is written in an extended Arabic alphabet rather than in Devanagari. Urdu also has more loans from Arabic and Persian than Hindi has.

There is much political friction that Punjabi is not an official language, in spite of its being by far the most commonly spoken mother-tongue in Pakistan.

Many other languages are spoken in Pakistan, including Siraiki (a Punjabi variant), Pashtu, Balochi, Hindko, Brahui, Burushaski, and other languages with smaller numbers of speakers.

See Demographics of Pakistan for a numerical breakdown of language groups.