Urdu

Urdu speakers in Bahrain are mostly Pakistanis, with Punjabis as the largest share, together with Muslims from Hyderabad and north India, and they form one of the oldest South Asian communities on the island, present since about 1950. They stand apart from other migrants because thousands serve in Bahrain's police, National Guard and armed forces, recruited through Pakistani army and navy foundations, and some 30,000 Pakistanis, Baloch among them, are now Bahraini citizens after long government service, though most of the community are foreign workers on renewable permits. Others drive taxis and trucks, run shops and restaurants, and work in construction, banking and medicine. Community life gathers around the Pakistan Club in Manama, the Pakistan School and Pakistan Urdu School, and Urdu poetry nights where poets from Pakistan, India and the Gulf recite ghazals late into the evening.

Iran's Urdu speakers are Pakistani and Indian Shia Muslims drawn by religion: seminary students in Qom and Mashhad, families who have settled near the shrines, and white-collar workers in Tehran, alongside a stream of some 200,000 Pakistani pilgrims a year. Unlike most Urdu-speaking Muslims worldwide, who are Sunni, the community in Iran is overwhelmingly Twelver Shia, and many have adopted Iranian forms of Muharram mourning and follow Iranian clerical authority. Urdu is the shared language even for those who speak Punjabi, Saraiki, Pashto or Balochi at home. About 3,500 Pakistani seminary students were in Iran in early 2026, and thousands of Pakistanis and Indians were evacuated during the wars of June 2025 and 2026.

Pakistanis in Iraq are a young, mostly male and largely undocumented community that grew out of the Shia pilgrimage: tens of thousands of Pakistanis who came to Karbala and Najaf for Ashura or Arbaeen stayed on to work in construction, hotels, delivery and farming. Unlike the Sunni Urdu speakers of the Gulf, most are Twelver Shia from Punjab, Karachi, Gilgit-Baltistan and Kurram, and Urdu is their common tongue even when they speak Punjabi, Saraiki or Balti at home. Pakistani groups run food and rest stations for pilgrims along the Arbaeen walk, and a few young men study at the seminaries of Najaf. Since 2024 Iraq has detained and deported thousands, banned new Pakistani workers, and pressed Pakistan into allowing pilgrimage only in organised groups from 2026.

Urdu is the common language of Kuwait's Pakistanis who are not Punjabi, chiefly Pashtuns from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Urdu-speaking Karachiites, Kashmiris, Hindko speakers, a few thousand Sindhis and a few Baloch, and of Indian Muslims from Hyderabad, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar who speak it at home. Pakistanis settled in Kuwait from the oil boom onward, but Kuwait stopped issuing them new visas for almost two decades until May 2025, so the community is older and more settled than most migrant groups, with about a dozen Pakistani schools teaching in English and Urdu. They work as drivers, mechanics, construction and oil-services workers, shopkeepers, doctors and engineers. Urdu poets from Kuwait recite their ghazals at mushaira poetry evenings across the Gulf.

Urdu speakers in Qatar, about 100,000 people, are Pakistanis from Karachi and the cities of Sindh, Saraiki- and Hindko-speaking districts and Kashmir who use Urdu as their everyday language, together with Muslims from Hyderabad, Lucknow and other Indian cities. Pakistanis have lived in Qatar since the 1940s, and their community schools in Doha date from the 1960s; the community now runs from drivers and mechanics to traders, accountants and doctors. Urdu poetry is their pride: a Doha literary society founded in 1991 holds an annual Indo-Pakistani mushaira and gives one of the best-known Urdu literary awards to a writer from each country. Most are Sunni Muslims, with a Shia minority and a small number of Pakistani Christians.