Asian languages
Bengali
Bangla or Bengali is the language spoken by the populations of Bangladesh and the neighbouring state of West Bengal in India. There are also significant Bengali-speaking communities in Assam (another Indian state also neighboring West Bengal and Bangladesh), and in immigrant populations in the West and the Middle East.
Farsi
Farsi (or Persian) a language spoken in Iran, Tajikistan, Afghanistan and Uzbekistan. It has official-language status in the first three countries. There are over 75 million native speakers. It belongs to the Indo-European language family.
Communication is generally mutually intelligible between Iranians, Tajiks, and Persian speaking Afghans, however Dari is the local name for the eastern dialect of Persian, one of the two official languages of Afghanistan, including Hazaragi - spoken by the Hazara people of central Afghanistan. Tajik could also be considered an eastern dialect of Persian, but contrary to Iranian and Afghan Persian, is written in the Cyrillic script.
Hindi
Hindi is a language spoken in most states in northern and central India. Hindi is the second most spoken language in the world, after Chinese. About 500 million people speak Hindi, in India and abroad, and the total number of people who can understand the language may be 800 million. A 1997 survey found that 66% of all Indians can speak Hindi, and 77% of the Indians regard Hindi as "one language across the nation'. More than 180 million people in India regard Hindi as their mother tongue.
Panjabi
Panjabi is the language of the Punjab regions of India and Pakistan. Panjabi is the official language of the Indian state of Punjab, and is also spoken in neighbouring areas such as Haryana and Delhi. In Pakistan, however, it is not an official language and has no official status in education.
Urdu
In Pakistan, Urdu is spoken as a mother tongue by a majority of urban dwellers in such cities as Karachi in the southern province of Sindh and Islamabad in the Punjab. In spite of its status as the national language, however, only 8% of Pakistanis speak Urdu as their first language with about 48% speaking Panjabi as a mother tongue. It is, however, the language of prestige and all signage, and literacy is compulsory in the Pakistani school system. As time goes by, more and more Pakistanis of Panjabi or other background are speaking Urdu as a first language.
In India, Urdu is spoken as a mother tongue by many in the northern and central states. While, in India, Muslims might ostensibly be seen as tending to identify more with Urdu, Hindus and Sikhs naturally speak Urdu regardless of religion, especially when they have grown up in such traditional Urdu-strongholds such as Lucknow and Hyderabad.