Da hewad ratlunke (talk | contribs) No edit summary |
Chartinael (talk | contribs) Sorry: Ethnic != Speaker, that's why ETHNOLOGUE says Ethnic Population and differentiates from Speaker Population. |
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|states = '''[[Afghanistan]]''': east, south, southwest, north and northwest<ref>[[University of Texas at Austin]] - [http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/middle_east_and_asia/afghanistan_ethnoling_97.jpg ''Ethnolinguistic Groups in Afghanistan'']</ref><br>'''[[Pakistan]]''': [[Khyber Pakhtunkhwa]], [[Federally Administered Tribal Areas|FATA]], northern [[Balochistan (Pakistan)|Balochistan]], and parts of [[Gilgit-Baltistan]] region<br>[[Iran]]: small part in the northeastern section;<br>and the [[Pashtun diaspora]] around the world</br> |
|states = '''[[Afghanistan]]''': east, south, southwest, north and northwest<ref>[[University of Texas at Austin]] - [http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/middle_east_and_asia/afghanistan_ethnoling_97.jpg ''Ethnolinguistic Groups in Afghanistan'']</ref><br>'''[[Pakistan]]''': [[Khyber Pakhtunkhwa]], [[Federally Administered Tribal Areas|FATA]], northern [[Balochistan (Pakistan)|Balochistan]], and parts of [[Gilgit-Baltistan]] region<br>[[Iran]]: small part in the northeastern section;<br>and the [[Pashtun diaspora]] around the world</br> |
||
|region = [[Central Asia]]-[[South Asia]] |
|region = [[Central Asia]]-[[South Asia]] |
||
|speakers = |
|speakers = Approx. 20 Mio.<ref>[http://www.lmp.ucla.edu/Profile.aspx?LangID=64&menu=004]</ref><ref>http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=pus Ethnologue]</ref> |
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|rank = [[List_of_languages_by_number_of_native_speakers#10_to_50_million_native_speakers|48]] |
|rank = [[List_of_languages_by_number_of_native_speakers#10_to_50_million_native_speakers|48]] |
||
|agency = [[Academy of Sciences of Afghanistan]] |
|agency = [[Academy of Sciences of Afghanistan]] |
||
Revision as of 08:27, 20 October 2010
| 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 Mio.[2][3] |
Indo-European ]
| |
| 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,[4] is an Iranian language spoken primarily by the Pashtun people in Afghanistan and northwestern Pakistan,[5] as well as by the Pashtun diaspora across the globe.
Pashto belongs to the Eastern Iranian languages [6] branch of the Indo-Iranian language family alongside Bactrian language and Soghdian language. The number of Pashto speakers is estimated to be nearly 50 million people world wide.[7] The Constitution of Afghanistan declares Pashto as one of the two official languages of the country, the other being Dari (Persian).[8][9][10][11]
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%[12][13][14][15] of the total population of Afghanistan.
Pashto is the first language of about 15.42%[16] 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,[17] and in Tajikistan.[13] There are also Pashtun communities in the southwestern part of Jammu and Kashmir as well as in Uttar Pradesh, India.[18][19][20]
Sizable Pashto-speaking communities also exist in the Middle East, especially in the United Arab Emirates[21] and Saudi Arabia, as well as in the United States, United Kingdom,[22] Thailand, Canada, Germany, Netherland, Sweden, Qatar and Australia.
Official Status
Pashto enjoys official status in Afghanistan alongside Dari (Afghan Persian), with full rights to usage in all aspects of government and education within respective natural linguistic borders. In Pakistan, Pashto is the official language of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, and is also widely used in the Balochistan province.
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.),[23] 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
| Front | Central | Back | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Close | i | u | |
| Mid | e | ə | o |
| Open | a | ɑ |
Pashto also has the diphthongs /ai/, /əi/, /ɑw/, /aw/.
Consonants
| Labial | Dental | Alveolar | Retroflex | Post- alveolar |
Palatal | Velar | Uvular | Glottal | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nasal | m | n | ɳ | ||||||
| Plosive | p b | t̪ d̪ | ʈ ɖ | k ɡ | q | ʔ | |||
| Affricate | t͡s d͡z | t͡ʃ d͡ʒ | |||||||
| Fricative | f | s z | ʂ ʐ | ʃ ʒ | ç ʝ | x ɣ | h | ||
| Approximant | l | j | w | ||||||
| Rhotic | r | ɺ̢ |
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.[24]
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.[25] Post 7th century borrowings came primarily from Arabic, Persian, Turkmen and Hindustani language,[26][27] with the modern educated speech borrowing words from English,[28] French,[28] and German.[28]
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:
| ا /ɑ, ʔ/ |
ب /b/ |
پ /p/ |
ت /t̪/ |
ټ /ʈ/ |
ث /s/ |
ج /d͡ʒ/ |
ځ /d͡z/ |
چ /t͡ʃ/ |
څ /t͡s/ |
ح /h/ |
خ /x/ |
| د /d̪/ |
ډ /ɖ/ |
ﺫ /z/ |
ﺭ /r/ |
ړ /ɺ̢, ɻ/ |
ﺯ /z/ |
ژ /ʒ/ |
ږ /ʐ, ʝ, ɡ/ |
س /s/ |
ش /ʃ/ |
ښ /ʂ, ç, x/ | |
| ص /s/ |
ض /z/ |
ط /t̪/ |
ظ /z/ |
ع /ʔ/ |
غ /ɣ/ |
ف /f/ |
ق /q/ |
ك / ک /k/ |
ګ /ɡ/ |
ل /l/ | |
| م /m/ |
ن /n/ |
ڼ /ɳ/ |
و /w, u, o/ |
ه /h, a, ə/ |
ۀ /ə/ |
ي /j, i/ |
ې /e/ |
ى /ai, j/ |
ۍ /əi/ |
ئ /əi/ |
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:
| Southwest | [ʂ] | [ʐ] | [ts] | [dz] | [ʒ] |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Southeast | [ʃ] | [ʒ] | [ts] | [dz] | [ʒ] |
| Northwest | [ç] | [ʝ] | [ts] | [z] | [ʒ] |
| Northeast | [x] | [ɡ] | [s] | [z] | [dʒ] |
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.[29]
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
- ^ University of Texas at Austin - Ethnolinguistic Groups in Afghanistan
- ^ [1]
- ^ http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=pus Ethnologue]
- ^ Dictionary.com, "Afghani," in The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. Source location: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2004. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/Afghani. Accessed: July 14, 2010.
- ^ UCLA Language Materials Project: Language Profile
- ^ Nicholas Sims-Williams, "Eastern Iranian Languages", Encyclopaedia Iranica Online, available at www.iranica.com, Link
- ^ "Pashto, Northern". SIL International. Ethnologue: Languages of the World. June 2010. Retrieved 2010-09-18.
Ethnic population: 49,529,000 possibly total Pashto in all countries.
- ^ Constitution of Afghanistan - Chapter 1 The State, Article 16 (Languages) and Article 20 (Anthem)
- ^ Banting, Erinn (2003). Afghanistan: The land. Crabtree Publishing Company. p. 4. ISBN 0778793354. Retrieved 2010-08-22.
{{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter:|coauthors=(help); More than one of|pages=and|page=specified (help) - ^ "General Information About Afghanistan". Abdullah Qazi. Afghanistan Online. Retrieved 2010-09-27.
- ^ "The Afghans - Language and Literacy". Center for Applied Linguistics (CAL). June 30, 2002. Retrieved 2010-09-16.
- ^ "Languages: Afghanistan". Central Intelligence Agency. CIA World Factbook. Retrieved 2010-09-18.
Afghan Persian or Dari (official) 50%, Pashto (official) 35%, Turkic languages (primarily Uzbek and Turkmen) 11%, 30 minor languages (primarily Balochi and Pashai) 4%, much bilingualism
- ^ a b "Pashto, Southern: a language of Afghanistan". SIL International. Ethnologue: Languages of the World. Retrieved 2010-09-18.
- ^ "AFGHANISTAN v. Languages". Ch. M. Kieffer. Encyclopædia Iranica. Retrieved 2010-10-10.
A. Official languages. Paṧtō (1) is the native tongue of 50 to 55 percent of Afghans...
- ^ Brown, Keith (2009). Concise encyclopedia of languages of the world. Elsevie. p. 845. ISBN 0080877745, 9780080877747. Retrieved 2010-09-24.
Pashto, which is mainly spoken south of the mountain range of the Hindu Kush, is reportedly the mother tongue of 60% of the Afghan population.
{{cite book}}: Check|isbn=value: invalid character (help); More than one of|pages=and|page=specified (help); Unknown parameter|coauthors=ignored (|author=suggested) (help) - ^ Government of Pakistan: Population by Mother Tongue
- ^ Ethnologue: Languages of the World - Languages of Iran
- ^ Walter R Lawrence, Imperial Gazetteer of India. Provincial Series, pg 36-37, Link
- ^ "Study of the Pathan Communities in four States of India". Khyber. Retrieved 2009-06-07.
- ^ "Phonemic Inventory of Pashto" (PDF). CRULP. Retrieved 2007-06-07.
- ^ Ethnologue: Languages of the World - Languages of United Arab Emirates
- ^ Ethnologue: Languages of the World - Languages of United Kingdom
- ^ Emeneau, M. B. (1962) "Bilingualism and Structural Borrowing" Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 106(5): pp. 430-442, p. 441
- ^ Michael M.T. Henderson, Four Varieties of Pashto
- ^ G. Morgenstierne, "'AFGHANISTAN vi. Paṧtō'", Encyclopaedia Iranica Online, available at www.iranica.com, Link
- ^ Vladimir Kushev (1997). "Areal Lexical Contacts of the Afghan (Pashto) Language (Based on the Texts of the XVI-XVIII Centuries)". Iran and the Caucasus. 1. Brill: 159–166. Retrieved 2009-06-07.
- ^ "Census of India, 1931, Volume 17, Part 2". Times of India. 1937. Retrieved 2009-06-07.
At the same time Pashto has borrowed largely from Persian, and Hindustani, and through those languages from Arabic.
{{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires|journal=(help) - ^ a b c Herbert Penzl (January -March 1961). "Western Loanwords in Modern Pashto". Journal of the American Oriental Society. 81 (1): 43–52. doi:10.2307/594900.
{{cite journal}}: Check date values in:|date=(help) - ^ D. N. MacKenzie, "A Standard Pashto", Khyber.org
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