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.
Languages of Pakistan
Urdu () is the national language (), "lingua franca" and one of two official languages of Pakistan (the other currently being English). Although only about 8% of Pakistanis speak it as their first language, it is widely spoken and understood as a second language by the vast majority of Pakistanis and is being adopted increasingly as a first language by urbanized Pakistanis. It was introduced as the lingua franca upon the capitulation and annexation of Sindh (1843) and Punjab (1849) with the subsequent ban on the use of Persian. According to the linguistic historian Tariq Rahman, however, the oldest name of what is now called Urdu is Hindustani or Hindvi and it existed in some form at least from the 14th century if not earlier (Rahman 2011). It was probably the Indo-Aryan language of the area around Delhi that absorbed words of Persian, Arabic, and Chagatai (a Turkic language)—in a process like the one that created modern English. This language, according to Rahman, is the ancestor of both modern Hindi and Urdu. These became two distinct varieties when Urdu was first Persianized in the 18th century and then Hindi was Sanskritized from 1802 onwards.