<b>This map shows the percentage of people in each district of Pakistan who spoke Pashto as their mother tongue at the time of the 1998 census.</b>
<p>The templates used to make this map can be found <a href="//commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Abbasi786786%27s_maps_of_the_districts_in_Pakistan_(National)" title="Category:Abbasi786786's maps of the districts in Pakistan (National)"><b>here</b></a>.
</p><p>The source for the data used in the creation of this file can be found <a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="https://web.archive.org/web/20170107124045/http://www.census.gov/population/international/data/mapping/demobase.html"><b>here</b></a> (must be accessed through Google Earth or another application which opens .SHP files). All the data is adjusted for 2020 district borders.
</p><p>The image was created with Gimp and a calculator.
</p><p>---
</p><p>Pashto, sometimes called Pakhto, or in Persian literature "Afghani" is an Eastern Iranian language mainly spoken in North-West Pakistan and South-East Afghanistan. It has 50 - 60 million native speakers.
</p><p><b>Pashto was spoken by 15.42% of Pakistanis as a first language in 1998 (20.41 million people).</b> 78% of the population of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, 30% of the population of Balochistan, 9.5% of the population of Islamabad, 4.2% of the population of Sindh, and 1.2% of the population of Punjab spoke Pashto as a first language in 1998.
</p><p><b>By 2017, the share of Pakistanis who spoke Pashto as their first language had risen to 18.24% (37.89 million people).</b> 80% of the population of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, 35% of the population of Balochistan, 19% of the population of Islamabad, 5.5% of the population of Sindh, and 2.0% of the population of Punjab spoke Pashto as a first language in 2017. District-level data for the 2017 census has not yet been made available, so this map uses 1998 data.
</p>
<b>TL;DR: There isn't any publicly available data on languages and their district-wise distributions for 2017 (as of the creation of this map in December 2020), so this map uses 1998 data, which means it may not stack up to the proper values they're at today. Since 1998, the proportion of Pashto speakers has doubled in Punjab (1% to 2%) and Islamabad (10% to 19%), increased significantly in Balochistan (30% to 35%) and Sindh (4% to 6%), and increased modestly in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (78% to 80%). Countrywide, the proportion of Pashto speakers has gone from 15% to 18%. Keep this in mind as you read this map.</b>
<a href="//commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Abbasi786786" title="User:Abbasi786786">Abbasi786786</a>
CC BY-SA 4.0
<span class="int-own-work" lang="en">Own work</span>