West Punjab
At Independence there was a Muslim majority in West Punjab with significant Hindu and Sikh minority. Nearly all of these minorities left West Punjab for India, to be replaced by large numbers of Muslims fleeing from the opposite direction. The official language of West Punjab was Urdu but most of the population spoke Punjabi using the Shahmukhi script. The linguist George Abraham Grierson in his multi volume Linguistic Survey of India (1904–1928) considered the various dialects up to then called "Western Punjabi", spoken in North, West, and South of Lahore in what is now Pakistani Punjab, as constituting instead a distinct language from Punjabi. (The local dialect of Lahore is the Majhi dialect of Punjabi, which has long been the basis of standard literary Punjabi.) Grierson proposed to name this putative language "Lahnda", and he dubbed as "Southern Lahnda" the coherent dialect cluster now known as Saraiki spoken in Multan Dera Ghazi Khan and Bahawalpur division and "North Lahnda" now known as Potwari spoken in Rawalpindi division and "Western Lahnda" now known as Hindko spoken in the regions bordering Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa.
Hindi in Pakistan
Before the partition of British India, Hindi was spoken in the region forming Pakistan by the Hindus and Sikhs residing there. It was taught across school and university levels, mainly in Punjab and Sindh. After the partition, most of these communities left for India; prominent Hindi writers with origins in Pakistan include Bhisham Sahni, Shailendra, Hullad Moradabadi, Uday Bhanu Hans, Narendra Mohan and others. Conversely, some first-generation Pakistanis who migrated from India during Pakistan's independence in 1947 were familiar with Hindi and the Devanagari script.