Pashto
پښتو
Pronunciation	[paʂˈto], [paçˈto], [paxˈto]
Native to	Afghanistan: east, south, southwest, north and northwest[1] Pakistan: Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, FATA, northern Balochistan, and parts of Gilgit-Baltistan region Iran: small part in the northeastern section; and the Pashtun diaspora around the world
Region	Central Asia-South Asia
Native speakers	Approx. 20 million[2][3][4]
Language family	Indo-European ] Pashto
Writing system	Pashto alphabet
Official status
Official language in	Afghanistan  Pakistan (K.P. and FATA)
Regulated by	Academy of Sciences of Afghanistan
Language codes
ISO 639-1	ps
ISO 639-2	pus
ISO 639-3	pus – Pashto (generic)

Pashto (Naskh: پښتو - [paʂˈto]; also transliterated Pakhto, Pushto, Pukhto, Pashtu, or Pushtu), also known as Afghani,^[5] is an Iranian language spoken primarily by the Pashtun people in Afghanistan and northwestern Pakistan,^[6] as well as by the Pashtun diaspora across the globe.

Pashto belongs to the Eastern Iranian languages ^[7] branch of the Indo-Iranian language family alongside Bactrian language and Soghdian language. The number of people of Pasthun ethnicity is estimated to be nearly 50 million people world wide.^[8] The Constitution of Afghanistan declares Pashto as one of the two official languages of the country, the other being Dari (Persian).^{[9][10][11][12]}

Geographic distribution

In Afghanistan, Pashto is primarily spoken in the east, south and southwest, but also in some northern and western parts of the country. No exact numbers are available, but different estimates show that Pashto is the mother tongue of 35-60%^{[13][14][15][16]} of the total population of Afghanistan.

Pashto is the first language of about 15.42%^[17] of Pakistan's 170 million people. It is the main language of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and northwestern Balochistan, but also spoken in parts of Mianwali and Attock districts of the Punjab province as well as by Pashtuns who are found living in different cities throughout the country. Modern Pashto-speaking communities are also found in the cities of Karachi and Hyderabad in Sindh. With close to 7 million ethnic Pashtuns by some estimates, Karachi has the largest Pashtun population in the world.

Other communities of Pashto speakers are found in northeastern Iran, primarily in South Khorasan Province to the east of Qaen, near the Afghan border,^[18] and in Tajikistan.^[14] There are also Pashtun communities in the southwestern part of Jammu and Kashmir as well as in Uttar Pradesh, India.^[19][20][21]

Sizable Pashto-speaking communities also exist in the Middle East, especially in the United Arab Emirates^[22] and Saudi Arabia, as well as in the United States, United Kingdom,^[23] Thailand, Canada, Germany, Netherland, Sweden, Qatar and Australia.

Official Status

Pashto and Dari Persian are the two official languages of Afghanistan - a status held until the 1930s by Persian alone.^[24] In the 1930s, a movement began to take hold to promote Pashto as a language of government, administration and art^[24] with the establishment of a Pashto Society in 1931 and the inauguration of the Kabul University in 1932 as well as the formation of the Pashto Academy Pashto Tolana in 1937.^[25] In 1936, Pashto was granted the status of an official language^[26] with full rights to usage in all aspects of government and education by royal decree despite the fact that the ethnically Pashtun rulers and bureaucrates spoke Persian at home and work.^[25] The status of official language was reaffirmed in 1964 by the constitutional assembly when Afghan Persian was officially renamed to Dari.^[27][28] In Pakistan, Pashto is the official language of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (formerly North-West Frontier Province) and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas.^{[citation needed]}

Grammar

Pashto is an SOV (Subject-Object-Verb) language with split ergativity. Adjectives come before nouns. Nouns and adjectives are inflected for two genders (masc./fem.),^[29] two numbers (sing./plur.), and four cases (direct, oblique I, oblique II and vocative). The verb system is very intricate with the following tenses: present, simple past, past progressive, present perfect and past perfect. There is also an inflection for the subjunctive mood.In any of the past tenses (simple past, past progressive, present perfect and past perfect), Pashto is an ergative language; i.e., transitive verbs in any of the past tenses agree with the object of the sentence.

Phonology

Vowels

Pashto also has the diphthongs /ai/, /əi/, /ɑw/, /aw/.

Consonants

The phonemes /q/, /f/ tend to be replaced by [k], [p].

The retroflex lateral flap /ɺ̢/ (//) is pronounced as retroflex approximant [ɻ] when final.

The retroflex fricatives /ʂ/, /ʐ/ that are preserved in southern dialects are replaced by palatal fricatives [ç], [ʝ] in west-central dialects, velars [x], [ɣ] in northern dialects, and postalveolars [ʃ], [ʒ] in southeastern dialects.^[30]

The velars /k/, /ɡ/, /x/, /ɣ/ followed by the close back rounded vowel /u/ assimilate into the labialized velars [kʷ], [ɡʷ], [xʷ], [ɣʷ].

Vocabulary

In Pashto, most of the native elements of the lexicon are related to other Eastern Iranian languages; those words can be easily compared to those known from Avestan, Ossetic and Pamir languages. However, a remarkably large number of words is special to Pashto.^[31] Post 7th century borrowings came primarily from Arabic, Persian, Turkmen and Hindustani language,^[32][33] with the modern educated speech borrowing words from English,^[34] French,^[34] and German.^[34]

Writing system

Pashto employs the Pashto alphabet, a modified form of the Persian alphabet which on its part is derived from the Arabic alphabet. It has extra letters for Pashto-specific sounds. Since the 17th century Pashto has been primarily written in the Naskh script, rather than the Nasta'liq script used for neighboring Persian and Urdu languages. The Pashto alphabet consists of 45 letters, and 4 diacritic marks. The following table gives the letters' isolated forms, along with IPA values for the letters' typical sounds:

Pashto is written from right to left.

Dialects

Pashto has two main dialects: a softer dialect spoken in the south, and a harder dialect in the north. It is dominated by the geographical spread of the shift in the pronunciation of these five consonants:

The morphological differences between the most extreme north-eastern and south-western dialects are comparatively few and unimportant, and the criteria of dialect differentiation in Pashto are primarily phonological.^[35]

See also

• Iranian Languages vocabulary comparison table
• Pashto alphabet
• List of Pashto language poets
• List of Pashto language singers
• Pre-Islamic scripts in Afghanistan

Notes and references

Bibliography

• Schmidt, Rüdiger (ed.) (1989). Compendium Linguarum Iranicarum. Wiesbaden: Reichert. ISBN 3-88226-413-6. {{cite book}}: |first= has generic name (help)
• Gusain, Lakhan (2008??) " A Grammar of Pashto". Ann Arbor, MI: Northside Publishers. ISBN ??
• Georg Morgenstierne (1926) Report on a Linguistic Mission to Afghanistan. Instituttet for Sammenlignende Kulturforskning, Serie C I-2. Oslo. ISBN 0-923891-09-9
• Herbert Penzl A Grammar of Pashto A Descriptive Study of the Dialect of Kandahar, Afghanistan ISBN 0923891722
• Herbert Penzl A Reader of Pashto ISBN 0923891714

External links

• H. G. Raverty. A Dictionary of the Puk'hto, Pus'hto, or Language of the Afghans. Second edition, with considerable additions. London: Williams and Norgate, 1867.
• The Pashto software localization and development
• پښتو ليکلاﺭ ښود, by Prof Zyar (Pashto)
• D. N. MacKenzie, "A Standard Pashto", Khyber.org
• Orthography and Phonemes in Pashto (Afghan)
• Freeware Online Pashto Dictionaries
• A Pashto Word List