Pakistan is spending the next three months instituting Urdu as its official language of government, though I think it might be more appropriate to say that it’s phasing out the official usage of its other official language, English. Though Urdu is the “national language” of the country, it has shared official status with English since Pakistan gained its independence from the British Empire back in 1947, and most government business is conducted in English to this day, so this transition is actually kind of a hefty process.
The funny thing about Urdu is that, although it’s Pakistan’s national language and lingua franca, it boasts relatively few native speakers as compared to some of the country’s biggest regional languages, especially Punjabi (around 75 million native speakers) and Pashto (between 25 and 30 million). It’s only really a native tongue in the urbanized parts of Pakistan’s southern Sindh province. There are actually considerably more native speakers of Urdu in India (around 52 million) than there are in Pakistan (around 15 million), but nearly all Pakistanis learn Urdu as a second or third language.
It’s also a relatively young language, having formed out of the integration of traditional Indian languages with the Persian, Turkish, and Mongolian that were all variously spoken around the Mughal court in the 16th-19th centuries. The official language at the Mughal court was Persian, but the Mughals themselves, and their soldiers, were Turko-Mongolian, while most of their subjects were Indian, so there was a lot of language-mixing going on in that empire (it’s highly unlikely that most Mughal soldiers spoke court Persian, and virtually impossible that all but the wealthiest of its Indian subjects did). In fact the name “Urdu” derives from the Turkic word ordu, which means “army” and from which we get our word “horde.” Back in Mughal days the word ordu was often used to refer to an army camp, so Urdu can be thought of as the colloquial language of those old army camps.
Eventually that colloquial tongue filtered even into upper class court-talk, and coalesced into a vernacular, and later into a literary language, called Hindustani (the language spoken in Hindustan, as the Pakistan-India region was known back then), and after the partition in 1947 the Indian variant became known as Hindi while the Pakistani variant was called Urdu. The two languages use different formal vocabularies and different writing systems (Arabic for Urdu and Devanagari/Sanskrit for Hindi), but in their common spoken forms they are still mutually intelligible despite periodic efforts to make them less so (by “purging” Urdu of Sanskrit vocabulary, for example, or “purging” Hindi of Arabic/Persian/Turkish vocabulary). Early forms of Hindustani can be attested a couple of centuries earlier than the Mughals, around the Sultanate of Delhi, but it really formed into a serious language under the Mughals. The earliest writings in Hindustani (Urdu) start appearing in the 16th century (though poets, and these new languages seemingly always get their first literary usages in poetry, were using earlier forms of the colloquial language before this), and the name “Urdu” starts being used toward the end of the 18th century. In the 19th century, when the Mughals had been eclipsed by the Brits, in terms of actual power on the subcontinent before being formally supplanted by the British Raj, Persian lost even its official status to Hindustani, which had long since surpassed the older tongue in usage.
Obviously English was going to remain one of the subcontinent’s official languages while the place was part of the British Empire, and it kept that status after independence simply because so many Pakistanis spoke it. Because colonialism is what it is, English always enjoyed the superior position to Urdu in terms of how its usage conveyed a person’s social status and cultural refinement. And, of course, English usage has been growing all over the world for quite a while now. The decision to emphasize Urdu as Pakistan’s real official language probably has to do with trying to protect the country’s cultural heritage and making official government documents and services accessible to as many Pakistanis as possible (only about 50% of Pakistanis can communicate in English, and those tend to be better educated and wealthier). Pakistan just went through a pretty major populist protest last summer and fall that only ended because the Pakistani Taliban attacked a school last December and united the entire country against it, so the government may be keen to do something to appeal to ordinary Pakistanis.
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