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Pashto (Naskh: پښتو‎, IPA: [pəʂ'to]), also rendered as Pakhto, Pushto, Pukhto, Pashtoe, Pashtu, Pushtu, also known as Afghani^[1]^[2] or Kabuli,^[3] is an Eastern Iranian language spoken by Pashtuns living in Afghanistan and Pakistan.^[4]

Native speakers of Pashto account for 42% of the Afghan population^[5] and 15.42% of Pakistan.^[6] As defined in the Constitution, Pashto is a national and official language of Afghanistan and is used for the administration of the Afghan government throughout the country.

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 main features of the dialects is the differences in the pronunciation of these five phonemes (all sounds in IPA):

Southwest:	[ts]	[dz]	[ʂ]	[ʐ]	[ʒ]
Southeast:	[ts]	[dz]	[ʃ]	[ʒ]	[ʒ]
Northwest:	[s]	[z]	[ç]	[j]	[ʒ]
Northeast:	[s]	[z]	[x]	[g]	[d͡ʒ]

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

File:Moderniranianlanguagesmap.jpg

Geographic distribution of Pashto (purple) and other Iranian languages

Pashto is spoken by about 30 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)^[7] and by over 15 million people in the south, east, west and a few northern provinces of Afghanistan (ca. 40% of the total population).^[8] In Pakistan, smaller, modern "transplant" communities are also found in Sindh (Karachi, Hyderabad). Other smaller communities of Pashto-speakers are also found in northeastern Iran and in India.^[9]^[10]

Official status

Pashto, along with Persian, is the national and official language 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. There is a definite article, which is quite similar in pronunciation to (The) in English. There is also extensive use of the demonstratives this/that. The verb system is very intricate with the following: Simple Present, Subjunctive, Simple Past, Past Progressive, Present Perfect, and Past Perfect. 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		ɑ

Pashto also has the diphthongs /aj/ /əj/ /aw/

Consonants

	Labial	Dental	Retroflex	Post- alveolar	Palatal	Velar	Uvular	Glottal
Nasal	m	n	ɳ
Plosive	p b	t d	ʈ ɖ			k g	q	ʔ
Fricative	f v	s z	ʂ ʐ	ʃ ʒ		x ɣ		h
Affricate		ts dz		tʃ dʒ
Approximant		l	ɻ		j	w
Rhotic		r	ɺ̡

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

The retroflex lateral flap /ɺ̡/ is pronounced as retroflex approximant [ɻ] when final.

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 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 has the extra letters that has been added to the Arabic alphabet such as pe (پ). It has a number of additional vowel diacritics as well, though these often vary in their usage.

Pashto alphabet

The letters of the Pashto alphabet are:^[11]^[12]

^{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

The letters below are specific to Pashto only:

^{ټ، ځ، څ، ډ، ړ، ږ، ښ، ګ،
ڼ، ې ،ۍ}

The five Yaas of Pashto

The following are the five Yaas used in Pashto writing:

^{ی، ي، ې، ۍ، ﺉ}

Examples

Template:ConvertIPA

Note - The following transliterations represent the Kabuli dialect.

Examples of intransitive sentence forms using the verb "to go" "tləl":

Command (you masculine-singular):

khawanze/shawanze (ښوونځى) ta dza! or khawanze/shawanze ta lāṛ ša!
School to go - Go to school!

Command (you masculine-plural):

khawanze/shawanze ta lāṛ šəy!
Go to school!

Simple Present:

zə khawanze/shawanze ta dzəm.
I school to go - I go to school.

zə ğwāṛəm če khawanze/shawanze ta lāṛ šəm.
I want that to school go (Masculine-I-verb form) - I want to go to school.

Present Perfect:

zə khawanze/shawanze ta tləlay yəm.
I school to gone (Masculine verb form) am - I have gone to school.

Simple Past:

zə khawanze/shawanze ta wəlāṛəm.
I school to went - I went to school.

Past Perfect:

zə khawanze/shawanze ta tləlay wəm.
I school to gone (Masculine verb form) was - I had gone to school.

Past Progressive:

zə khawanze/shawanze ta makh kay talay um"
I school to was going - I was going to school or I used to go to school

Examples of transative sentence forms using the verb "to eat" "xwaṛəl":

Command (You singular):

Panir wəxora!
cheese eat - Eat the cheese!

Panir məxora!
cheese no-eat - Don't eat the cheese!

Command (You plural):

Panir wəxorəy!
cheese eat - Eat the cheese!

Panir məxorəy!
cheese no-eat - Don't eat the cheese!