Image: Distribution of Pakistanis speaking Balochi or Brahui as a first language in 1998

Description: This map shows the percentage of people in each district of Pakistan who spoke either Balochi or Brahui 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. Balochi is a Northwestern Iranian language spoken by approximately 8 to 10 million people worldwide. More than 70% of Balochi-speakers worldwide live in Pakistan's Balochistan province. It is Pakistan's sixth-most-widely-spoken mother tongue, coming after Punjabi, Pashto, Sindhi, Saraiki, and Urdu. Brahui is a northern Dravidian language that is mainly spoken in the central region of Pakistan's Balochistan province, making it geographically isolated from all other Dravidian languages, the nearest one being over 1,500 kilometers away in South India. It is Pakistan's eighth-most-widely spoken mother tongue and has approximately 2.6 million speakers nationwide. Balochi and Brahui were counted together as a single language in the census of 1998, despite being very different and having very different histories. In the 2017 census, though, they were counted as separate languages. In 1998, 3.57% (4.72 million) of Pakistanis spoke either Balochi or Brahui as their mother tongue. 55% of the population of Balochistan, 2.1% of the population of Sindh, and 0.66% of the population of Punjab spoke Balochi or Brahui as first languages in 1998. By 2017, the share of Pakistanis who spoke Balochi or Brahui as their mother tongue had risen to 4.26%, totalling 8.85 million people (Balochi alone made up 3.02% and Brahui alone made up 1.24%). 52.6% of the population of Balochistan (35.4% Balochi and 17.1% Brahui) spoke either of these two languages as their mother tongue in 2017. The share of people who spoke Balochi (alone) natively made up 2.00% of the population of Sindh and 0.83% of the population of Punjab in 2017. TL;DR: There isn't any publicly available data on languages and their district-wise distributions for 2017 (as of the creation of this map in November 2020), so this map uses 1998 data, which means it may not stack up to the proper values they're at today. Also, in 1998, Balochi and Brahui, two very different languages, were counted as the same language in the census. In 2017, the two languages were counted separately. Nationwide, 3.57% of the population of Pakistan spoke either Balochi or Brahui in 1998, but this figure rose to 4.26% by 2017 (In 2017 Balochi alone made up 3.02% and Brahui alone made up 1.24%). In Balochistan province, 55% of the population spoke either Balochi or Brahui as a first language in 1998, and by 2017, this figure had fallen to 52.6% (35.4% Balochi and 17.1% Brahui). Note: Jafarabad and Sohbatpur Districts in Balochistan (bordering Sindh) are marked "No Data" because it is impossible to determine their categories. The area which covers these two districts today was only one district in 1998, and the old tehsil borders of that district do not align with the current district borders. In 1998, though, 62.25% of the population of the two districts spoke either Balochi or Brahui as their mother tongue.
Title: Distribution of Pakistanis speaking Balochi or Brahui 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
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