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

Description: This map shows the percentage of people in each district of Pakistan who spoke Punjabi 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. --- Punjabi is a Northwestern Indo-Aryan language mainly spoken in Pakistan's Punjab province and the Indian state of Punjab. It has more than 125 million native speakers worldwide, and is the most widely spoken mother tongue in Pakistan. Western Punjabi, spoken in Pakistan, is also considered the 9th most-spoken first language in the world by Ethnologue 2019 (22nd edition) Punjabi was spoken by 44.15% of Pakistanis as a first language in 1998 (58.39 million people). 75% of the population of Punjab, 72% of the population of Islamabad, 7.0% of the population of Sindh, 2.5% of the population of Balochistan, and 0.86% of the population of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa spoke Punjabi as a first language in 1998. By 2017, the share of Pakistanis who spoke Punjabi as their first language had fallen to 38.78% (80.55 million people). 70% of the population of Punjab, 52% of the population of Islamabad, 5.3% of the population of Sindh, 1.1% of the population of Balochistan, and 0.50% of the population of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa spoke Punjabi as a first language 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 December 2020), so this map uses 1998 data, which means it may not stack up to the proper values they're at today. Since 1998, the proportion of Punjabi speakers has fallen slightly in Punjab (from 75% to 70%), fallen significantly in Islamabad (72% to 52%), (7.0% to 5.3%), Balochistan (2.5% to 1.1%), and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (0.86% to 0.50%). Countrywide, the proportion of Pakistanis speaking Punjabi has fallen from 44% to 39%. Keep all of this in mind as you read this map. --- DISCLAIMER: Speakers of Hindko and Saraiki are not included in these results because Saraiki speakers had their own category, while Hindko speakers marked "Other" en masse. On the other hand Pahari-Pothwari is included in this data as speakers of that dialect/language selected "Punjabi" when being surveyed instead of "Other".
Title: Distribution of Pakistanis speaking Punjabi 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