Why is Pakistan's official language Urdu, which is spoken by 8% of the population?

Question

Over 30 distinct languages are more widely spoken with Punjabi spoken by an estimated 65% of the population.

Answer 1

You are right about 30 languages but the thing is they are regional(local) languages and are not spoken widely in Pakistan. and punjabi is not the spoken by 65% pop,
Urdu is evolved from Persian, Sansikrit, Arabic and English mixed together and it is widely spoken and understood in four countries, India, Pakistan, Afganistan and a bit in BanglaDesh. There are atleast 65 million Urdu speakers worldwide and majority are in southeast asia.
Urdu is National language of Pakistan because it is spoken and understood in every corner of country. 30 or more groups who speek regional mother languages can only communicate to each other via Urdu because they cannt understand other local languages.
As this southeast asia has a rich historical values and it served as a hub in the past centuries, a language was in demand for communication among different cultures and because region was conqoured and ruled by persian,afganis and british so urdu was developed. The word Urdu means Language of Armies .

Answer 2

Ah, it's good to be king, isn't it? Historically, humans have almost always been ruled by others not of their culture nor nation nor language. The U.S. is unique in its pioneering idea of letting the people speak (whether the government listens or not is a whole other question). Your Pakistan question sounds much like Saddam Hussein's minority Sunni ruling Iraq where the majority were Shia. Then there's Burma.

I would recommend learning Hebrew, because that's what Jesus likely will be speaking when He comes back to take over, which looks to be rather soon, don't yu tink?

Answer 3

Actually ,English is our official language too. Coming to Hindi, I would rather support the use and spread of Hindi as it is easy to learn and lets us mingle with the common folk in majority of Indian states. The problem is not with Hindi but with the way they teach the language, which could be learnt sufficiently well even by a moron within 2 years, provided it is taught in proper way. They should teach us speaking and listening first with less emphasis on reading and writing. I , am really ashamed of ,not having learnt Hindi properly, though I always outdid in exams many of my classmates whose mother tongue was Hindi. I could read well, write well, and listen and grasp the sounds.But never could I utter a word on my own nor comprehend what was spoken. Whatever I picked up later after school really helped me lot. What I did was watch movies, listen to Mukesh(I brought his entire album), Rafi and Kishore . It was enjoyable, easy and more practical. I ask all those idiots who teach languages how you can teach a language , any , unless the student listens to how it is spoken in real life? Expose them to listening , which is completely absent in language classes. Nobody in Indian can master English unless he starts listening to genuine native speakers at a tender age. What we speak and write here is not authentic, its mostly Indianian and artificial. A language should be spoken as it should be , not otherwise. Don't say it is ours is dialect ,sadly it is not true. People of A.P speak different versions of Telugu but nobody finds it hard to understand other.We even mimic and mock and make fun of others dialect. How many of us can truly understand an English movie without subtitles? Very few.Again the problem is teaching methods.Had I put in 1 per cent of that much effort in learning Hindi that I put in learning English, I would be an eminent scholor in Hindi or would be writing movie scripts for Bollywood movies.See still struggling with the sentence, that is due to years of bad teaching and reckless learning. Let us all use English as much as we can and learn Hindi too. That is the cool thing, man.You don't want to be left out do you?