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Comment by the_arun | Hacker News Reader

I respect & appreciate talent of Pakistanis in art & music. They have some legendary singers. Not sure it is the language (Urdu) giving them that skill or they are natively talented.

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It's because the Mughal Kings who ruled most of the Indian subcontinent for a couple of hundred years really promoted art and music (instead of science and technology, I might add).

https://www.thefridaytimes.com/where-the-mughals-got-their-m...

Ironically, few past leaders were barely able to speak eloquent Urdu. Pakistani elites grew speaking English. Khan can barely speak his own Pashto, and only so, so Urdu.

Urdu is the native language of a very small number of Pakistanis, mostly the 3% of the population that descend from families that moved from India at independence, the Mojahirs. Punjabi and Sindhi are mother tongue to far more people.

Pakistani here. While that is true, everyone speaks Urdu. If you have a regional language you can grow up speaking both languages fluently, or just one—depending on which you're more exposed to—and even English if you were educated in it.

For example, my dad's regional language was Seraiki, and my mom's Punjabi, and they speak both and Urdu fluently. I grew up in an area where the regional language was Punjabi. But, I'm not as fluent in Punjabi or Seraiki as I am in Urdu.

However, I've never had trouble using Urdu with someone in Pakistan, even if their regional language was Sindhi, Pashto or Hindko. Also, I don't know why if it's just me, but most regional languages sound very similar—I've had conversations where I spoke Urdu while the other person spoke in a regional language.

Yeah, apart from Brahui all the languages of Pakistan are Indo-Aryan or Baluch, which is closer to Persian (Farsi). Urdu is part of the Hindustani dialect continuum that stretches across the North of the Indian subcontinent. Speaking three of these languages is like speaking Spanish, Italian and Portugese. Standards are different, vocabulary will differ quite a lot. The intelligibility you speak of is in part the product of 70 years of tv, radio and education though. Smoothing out of dialectal differences. Hindi is the same in North India. Not surprising since Urdu and Hindi are pretty much the same language bar the writing system and scientific/technical/legal/formal vocabulary.

I'm from Nepal and Urdu and Hindi sound similar to me. I can understand most Pakistanis pretty well, even though I only know Hindi.

As per the 1998 census, 7.6% of the population usually speaks Urdu in their household.

http://www.pbs.gov.pk/sites/default/files/other/yearbook2007...

I’m sure there are plenty of people who aren’t Mohajirs who speak Urdu at home but a lot of those people are going to be making a political statement more than one that a linguist would agree with. You see the same shading of reality in Ireland where 10% of the population say they speak Irish weekly or in Ukraine where the number of people who said they were native speakers of Ukrainian rather than Russian jumped dramatically after the Russian invasion.

I understand what you are saying, but I think a likelier explanation is that a small percentage of the population of modern day Pakistan were already Urdu speakers before partition.

I am open to changing my mind or confirming my theory, given empirical evidence.

To give you an example, listen to Waseem Akhtar criticizing Ch. Nisar.

https://youtu.be/qeXlgNZTcmA

You can tell by his grammar that his family belongs to UP.

Mohajir, you seem to have the 'h' and 'j' interchanged.

I will remember.

I saw this playing on a Pakistani's colleagues desk walking past, intrigued he sent me the link.

Play with CC, the atmosphere and lyrics I find of this live piece is magical. I still come back to it occasionally.

https://youtul.be/gjaH2iuoYWE

I would recommend going down that rabbit hole (specially Coke Studio videos with CC) sometime. There are many more magical ones in there.

Some of my favs:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ra5nTlty6CM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgmqIpIbBVY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDkCEFmYfE4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzdMLhGOIhA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzb6uI7xRA8

(Enable CC and read along)

Thanks for sharing this. Coke Studio is amazing. I have introduced many friends to Pakistani music with Coke Studio. Almost everyone loves it. Got friends who keep asking me for links to same videos, lol.

This is the correct url: https://youtu.be/gjaH2iuoYWE

Lol you should find the videos of his dad if you like those

Perhaps it's a typo, but youtul(dot)be is probably not a link anyone wants to click on.

Wow, this is one of the most ear-catching songs I have ever heard. Thank you for sharing.

The instrument he is using with bells is called chimta (literally, tongs)

Punjabi folk is quite beautiful. Sufi music is great, and the lyrically it's profoundly beautiful.

For someone who's new to it I think Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan is good gateway: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0gND07edEI

And for something more poppy, Nazia Hassan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7zm5XTvIT8

I'm a big fan of Nasreddin stories, so could someone please give me an ELI5 condensation of the role of Sufism within wider islamic thought?

It's basically just people who go deep on the spirituality part of religion, with very intense prayer and meditation, very focused lifestyle, etc. Religiously they generally adhere to the mainstream schools of Islam and consider themselves part of the wider religious community.

The more recent movement of Salafism, centered in Saudi Arabia, has made Sufism one of their targets in their quest to 'clean up' Islam, since it doesn't fit into their back-to-basics view on religion. So there is quite a big schism now between this movement and its followers, and the general community (for whom Sufism is an ingrained, and often treasured, tradition).

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