PAKLINKS BANNER EXCHANGE
Pakistan's population was estimated at 128 million in January 1995, the ninth largest in the world and increasing by 3.1 percent a year one of the highest birth rates in Asia. In 1901 there were only 16.6 million people in what is now Pakistan.
A third of Pakistan's population live in the big cities, the biggest being Karachi (population about 11 million), Lahore (8 million), Faisalabad and Rawalpindi-lslamabad (3 million each), Hyderabad, Multan, Gujranwala and Peshawar (2 million each), and Sialkot, Sargodha and Quetta (one million each). About three quarters of all Pakistanis live in the Indus Valley, leaving the desert areas virtually are uninhabited.
Fertile Punjab is by far the most populous province with 72 million inhabitants, followed by Sindh with over 31 million, NWFP claims over 16 million, Balochistan 7 million and over a million live in the Northern Areas.
Though united by Islam there are many ethnic groups speaking over 20 languages, the major ones being Punjabi in Punjab; Sindhi and Seraiki in Sindh; Balochi, Pushtu and Brahui in Balochistan; Pushtu, Hindko, Kashmiri, Khowar, Kohistani, Gujar and Kalashi in the North-West Frontier Province, and Balti, Shina, Burushaski and Wakhi in the Northern Areas. The linguistic picture is further complicated by the multiplicity of tribal dialects that have evolved in isolated valleys.
Of the above, Burushaski belongs to no known language family, and Brahui is an ancient Dravidian tongue, now mainly restricted to South India. Balochi belongs to the Iranian sub-family of Indo-European languages and Balti is ancient Tibetan. Kashmiri, Khowar, Kohistani, Kalashi and Shina are all Indo-European Dardic languages, while Sindhi and Seraiki, Punjabi and Urdu show a much simpler pattern of Indo-Aryan languages.
The lingua franca of Pakistan is Urdu, which means "army" or "camp", reflecting that the language was formed from a mixture of Hindi, local languages, and the Persian, Arabic and Turkish spoken by invaders from the North. Though Urdu is the mother-tongue of only a fraction of the population, it is the medium of education in schools and the majority understand at least a few words. English is also taught in some schools and the more educated people are reasonably fluent there is no difficulty in making yourself understood in the larger towns.