Sindhi Language Facts

Sindhi is the language of the Sindh region of Pakistan and among 22 constitutionally recognized languages of India. It is spoken by an estimated 34,410,910 people in Pakistan. It is the third most spoken language in all of Pakistan and is the official language of the province of Sindh. It is also spoken in India by some 2,820,485 speakers. The government of Pakistan issues national identity cards to its citizens only in two languages, Sindhi and Urdu. It is an Indo-Aryan language of the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European language family. It has influences from a local version of spoken form of Sanskrit and from Balochi spoken in the adjacent province of Balochistan. Most Sindhi speakers are concentrated in the Sindh province and in Kutch, India where Sindhi is a local language. The remaining speakers in India are composed of the Hindu Sindhis who migrated from Sindh and settled in India after partition and the Sindhi diaspora worldwide.