Pashto

Pashto
Pashto
پښتو paʂto
Native to	Afghanistan: south, east, and some parts of north and west; Pakistan: northwestern provinces (NWFP, northwestern Balochistan, and some parts of Northern Areas); some parts of northeastern Iran
Region	southern Central Asia
Native speakers	approx. 38 million
Language family	Indo-European Indo-Iranian Iranian Eastern Iranian South Eastern Pashto; ; ; ; ;
Writing system	Naskh, Latin
Official status
Official language in	Afghanistan; Pakistan (provincial)
Language codes
ISO 639-1	ps
ISO 639-2	pus
ISO 639-3	Variously:; pus – Pashto (generic); pst – Central Pashto; pbu – Northern Pashto; pbt – Southern Pashto

Pashto (Naskh: پښتو‎ - IPA: [paʂ'to]; alternative spelling: Pakhto, Pushto, Pukhto, Pashtu, or Pushtu), also known as Afghani,^[3]^[4] is an Indo-European language spoken primarily in Afghanistan and northwestern Pakistan.^[5] Pashto belongs to the Eastern Iranian branch of the Indo-Iranian language family.^[6] There are nearly 38 million Pashtuns. 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, along with other historic and linguistic reasons, Afghanistan has a very high linguistic diversity (there are about 50 languages; most are East Iranian, Nuristani and Dardic, and few are Turkic and West Iranian). There are also many dialects in Pashto language. The two main dialects are soft or southern dialect and hard or northern dialect. Paktika is roughly the dividing line. One of the primary features of the dialects is the differences in the pronunciation of these two phonemes (all sounds in IPA):

Southern (Kandahar):	[ʂ]	[ʐ]
Southeastern (Quetta):	[ʃ]	[ʒ]
Central Waneci (Tarin):	[ʂ]	[ʐ]
Central Waziri (Wana):	[ɕ]	[ʑ]
Central Khosti (Khost):	[x]	[g]
Northwestern (Ghilzi):	[ç]	[ʝ]
Northern (Nangarhar):	[x]	[g]
Northeastern (Yusufzi):	[x]	[g]

The differences between the southern dialects and the northern dialects are primarily phonological and there are simple conversion rules. The morphological differences between them are very few and unimportant. However, the central dialects are lexicologically different and very varied. The southern dialect of Kandahar is the most conservative with regards to phonology, retaining the retroflex fricatives and the alveolar affricates, which have not merged with other phonemes. The Pashto alphabet reflects the southern dialect. Certain dialects show many archaic features, some of which are discarded by the literary language.

Geographic distribution

File:Moderniranianlanguagesmap.jpg

Geographic distribution of Pashto (purple) and other Iranian languages

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% of the total population)^[7] and by over 11 million people in the south, east, west and a few northern provinces of Afghanistan (30%^[8] to 35%^[9] of the total population). In Pakistan, smaller, modern "transplant" communities are also found in Sindh (Karachi, Hyderabad). Other smaller communities of Pashto-speakers are found in northeastern Iran.

Official status

Pashto and Dari are official languages of Afghanistan. But Dari, spoken by more than 50% of the population, is the language of communication among all ethnic groups in Afghanistan. No language is called national language in the country's constitution. Dari (widely known as Farsi or Persian) is also 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 is a repository of the cultural and social heritage of the country (See Afghanistan constitution and CIA factbook).

Grammar

Pashto is a S-O-V language with split ergativity. Adjectives come before nouns. Nouns and adjectives are inflected for gender (masc./fem.), number (sing./plur.), and case (direct, oblique I, oblique II and vocative). 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 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/, /ae/, /ɑw/, /aw/.

Consonants

	Labial	Dental	Alveolar	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	(θ) (ð)	s z	ʂ ʐ	ʃ ʒ		x ɣ		h
Affricate		ts dz			tʃ dʒ
Approximant		l				j	w
Rhotic		r		ɺ̡

/f/, /θ/, /ð/, /q/ are present only in loanwords, and tend to merge with [p], [s], [z], [k].

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

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

Vocabulary

In Pashto most of the lexicon is of Eastern Iranian origin; those words can be easily compared to those known from Avestan, Ossetic and Pamir languages. Modern borrowings come primarily from Arabic, Persian.

Writing system

From the time of Islam's rise in southern 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 nineteenth and twentieth 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 more vowels and consonants than either Arabic or Persian. As a result, the Pashto alphabet has several letters which do not appear in any other Arabic script. For example, the letters representing the retroflex consonants /ʈ/, /ɖ/, /ɺ̡/ and /ɳ/ are written like the standard Arabic teh, dâl, reh and nun with a "panddak", "gharrwandah" or also called "skarraen" attached underneath, which looks like a small circle: ړ ,ډ ,ټ, and ڼ, respectively. It also has the letters šin and žeh (representing voiceless and voiced retroflex fricatives), which look like a sin and reh respectively with a dot above and beneath: ښ and ږ. The letters representing /ts/ and /dz/ are also specific to Pashto; they look like a ح with three dots above and an hamza (ء) above; څ and ځ. It has a number of additional vowel diacritics as well.

Pashto alphabet

The letters of the Pashto alphabet are:^[10]^[11]

^{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}

Pashto Latin Alphabet

The Pashto Latin alphabet is based on the following 41 graphemes:

Aa ( َ ), Ââ (ا), Bb (ب), Cc (څ), Çç (چ), Dd (د), Ďď (ډ), DHdh (ذ), Ee (ې), Ëë (ہ), Ff (ف), Gg (ګ), Ģģ (غ), Hh (ه), Ii (ي), Jj (ژ), Kk (ک), Ķķ (خ), Ll (ل), Mm (م), Nn (ن), Ňň (ڼ), Oo (و), Pp (پ), Qq (ق), Rr (ر), Řř (ړ), Ss (س), Šš (ښ), Şş (ش), Tt (ت), Ťť (ټ), THth (ث), Uu ( ُ or و), Vv (ب or و), Ww (و), Xx (ځ), XHxh (ج), Yy (ى), Zz (ز), Žž (ږ)

The letters a, â, e, ë, i, o and u are vowels, and the remainder are consonants. The letter c represents /ts/, x represents /dz/, j represents /ʒ/ and y represents /j/. The háček (in ď, ň, ř, š, ť and ž) is used for retroflex consonants, and the cedilla (in ç, ģ, ķ and ş) indicates either change of dental/alveolars into post-alveolars or change of velar plosives into fricatives. The dighraphs dh, th and xh represent /ð/, /θ/ and /dʒ/. Other letters represent the same consonants as their values in the IPA.

Examples

Note - The following transliterations represent the southern dialect.

Examples of intransitive sentence forms using the verb "tlël" (to go):

Command:

Wë šawanxi ta xa! (pronounce xa as 'dza')
(you sing.) Go to school!

Present:

Zë wë šawanxi ta xëm.
I go to school.

Present Perfect:

Zë wë šawanxi ta tlëlai yëm.
I have gone to school.

Past:

Zë wë šawanxi ta wlâřëm.
I went to school.

Past Perfect:

Zë wë šawanxi ta tlëlai wëm.
I had gone to school.

Past Progressive:

Zë wë šawanxi ta tlëm.
I was being going or I used to go to school.

Subjunctive:

Cheh zë wë šawanxi ta tlëlai.
I wish I go to school.

Examples of transitive sentence forms using the verb "ķwařël" (to eat):