Language
Historically, Sindhi and Balochi were spoken by the native population before the British conquest in 1843 by Charles James Napier. During British rule, many Gujrati and Parsi business families and Christian Goans bureaucracy migrated from Bombay Presidency to Karachi as it was being developed as a major port. After independence of Pakistan in 1947, Muslim refugees (Muhajirs) migrated to Karachi. The vast majority of Muhajirs spoke Urdu. Today Karachi is predominantlry Urdu speaking city with many other languages also spoken in the city. The Pashtuns (Pakhtuns or Pathans), originally from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, FATA and northern Balochistan, are now the city's third largest ethnic group in Karachi after Muhajirs. With as high as 7 million by some estimates, the city of Karachi in Pakistan has the largest concentration of urban Pakhtun population in the world, including 50,000 registered Afghan refugees in the city. As per current demographic ratio Pashtuns are about 12% of Karachi's population.
According to the census of 1998 linguistic distribution of the city is: Urdu: 38.52%; Sindhi: 27.34%;Punjabi: 13.64%; Pashto: 11.96%; Balochi: 4.34%; Saraiki: 2.11%; others: 2.09%. The others include Dari, Gujarati, Dawoodi Bohra, Memon, Marwari, Brahui, Makrani, Khowar, Burushaski, Arabic, Persian and Bengali.
Read more about this topic: Karachi Culture
Famous quotes containing the word language:
“It is still not enough for language to have clarity and content ... it must also have a goal and an imperative. Otherwise from language we descend to chatter, from chatter to babble and from babble to confusion.”
—René Daumal (1908–1944)
“The great pines stand at a considerable distance from each other. Each tree grows alone, murmurs alone, thinks alone. They do not intrude upon each other. The Navajos are not much in the habit of giving or of asking help. Their language is not a communicative one, and they never attempt an interchange of personality in speech. Over their forests there is the same inexorable reserve. Each tree has its exalted power to bear.”
—Willa Cather (1873–1947)