Northern Pashto

Native speakers of Pashto account for roughly 35% of the population of Afghanistan⁷ and 15.42% of Pakistan.⁸ As defined in the Constitution of Afghanistan, Pashto is a national and official language of Afghanistan.

Dialects

As a consequence of life in mountainous areas, weak socio-economic inter-relations, along with other historic and linguistic reasons, there are many dialects in Pashto language. However, as a whole, Pashto has two main dialects: soft or western dialect and hard or eastern dialect. The difference between these two dialects is in the use of some vowels and sounds. One of the primary features of the dialects is the differences in the pronunciation of these five phonemes (all sounds in IPA):

The dialect of Kandahar is the most conservative with regards to phonology, retaining both the dental affricates and the retroflex fricatives, which have not merged with other phonemes.

Geographic distribution

Pashto is spoken by about 27 million people in the western provinces of North-West Frontier Province, Federally Administered Tribal Areas, and Balochistan of Pakistan (15.4% of the total population)⁹ and by over 11 million people in the south, east, west and a few northern provinces of Afghanistan (ca. 50% of the total population).⁷ In Pakistan, smaller, modern "transplant" communities are also found in Sindh (Karachi, Hyderabad). Other smaller communities of Pashto-speakers are found in northeastern Iran and among recent migrants in India.¹⁰¹¹

Official status

Pashto is one of the two national and official languages (along with Dari Persian) of Afghanistan and is used for the administration of the government throughout the country. It is also used in education, literature, office and court business, media, and in religious institutions, etc. It holds in itself a repository of the cultural and social heritage of the country.

Grammar

Pashto is a S-O-V language with split ergativity. Adjectives come before nouns. Nouns and adjectives are inflected for gender (Masculine/Feminine), number (Singular/Plural), and case (Direct/Oblique). Direct case is used for subjects and direct objects in the present tense. Oblique case is used after most pre- and post-positions, as well as in the past tense as the subject of transitive verbs. Pashto does not have a definite article. There is extensive use of the word "of" (د) to show possessional relationships which is quite similar in pronunciation to (the) in English. The demonstratives (translated as "this" and "that") are used extensively. The verb system is very intricate with the following tenses: Present; Subjunctive; Simple Past; Past Progressive; Present Perfect; and Past Perfect. In any of the past tenses (Simple Past, Past Progressive, Present Perfect, 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

Consonants

The sounds /f/, /q/, /h/ are present only in loanwords. Less educated speakers tend to replace them with [p], [k] and ʔ or nothing, respectively.

Vocabulary

Pashto has an ancient legacy of borrowing vocabulary from neighboring languages mainly from Vedic Sanskrit and Persian. Invaders have left vestiges as well as Pashto has borrowed words from Ancient Greek, Arabic and Turkic languages, sometimes due to invasions. Modern borrowings come primarily from English.

Writing system

From the time of Islam's rise in South-Central Asia, Pashto has used a modified version of the Arabic script. The seventeenth century saw the rise of a polemic debate which also was polarized along lines of script. The heterodox Roshani movement wrote their literature mostly in the Persianate style called the Nasta'liq script. The followers of the Akhund Darweza, and the Akhund himself, who viewed themselves as defending the religion against the influence of syncretism, wrote Pashto in the Arabicized Naskh. With some individualized exceptions Naskh has been the generally used script in the modern era of Pashto, roughly corresponding with the late 19th and 20th centuries, due to its greater adaptability for typesetting. Even lithographically reproduced Pashto has been calligraphied in Naskh as a general rule, since it was adopted as standard.

Pashto has several letters which do not appear in any other Arabic script which represent the retroflex versions of the consonants /t/, /d/, /r/, /n/. The letters are written like the standard Arabic ta', dal, ra', and nun with a "pandak", "gharwandah" or also called "skarraen" attached underneath which looks like a small circle; ړ ,ډ ,ټ, and ڼ, respectively. It also has the letters ge and xin (the initial sound of which is IPA: [ç])like the German ch found in the word "ich") which look like a ra' and sin respectively with a dot above and beneath. Pashto also uses the letters added to the Arabic alphabet from Persian, such as pe (پ). It has a number of additional vowel diacritics as well, though these often vary in their usage.

The Pashto letters ge and xin are romanised as Jj (pronounced IPA: [ʒ] or IPA: [ɡ]) and Xx (pronounced IPA: [x] or IPA: [ʃ]), which are separate from the letters KHkh and Gg. The Pashto Latin alphabet is: Aa Əə Bb Cc Čč Dd DZdz Ee Ff Gg Ğğ Hh İi Iı Jj Kk KHkh Ll Mm Nn Ññ Oo Öö Pp Qq Rr Řř Ss Šš Tt TSts Uu Úú Üü Vv Ww Yy Ýý Xx Žž Zz ´

Pashto alphabet

^{ا ب پ ت ټ ث ج ځ چ څ ح خ د ډ ذ ر ړ ز ژ ږ س ش ښ ص ض ط ظ ع غ ف ق ک ګ ل م ن ڼ ه و ى ئ ي ې ۍ}

Letters specific to Pashto

^{ټ، ځ، څ، ډ، ړ، ږ، ښ، ګ، ڼ، ې ،ۍ}

The five Yaas of Pashto

Examples

Contents