Pashto

A national language of Afghanistan,[14] Pashto is primarily spoken in the east, south, and southwest, but also in some northern and western parts of the country. The exact number of speakers is unavailable, but different estimates show that Pashto is the mother tongue of 45–60%[15][16][17][18] of the total population of Afghanistan.

In Pakistan, Pashto is spoken by 15% of its population,[19][20] mainly in the northwestern province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and northern districts of Balochistan province. It is also spoken in parts of Mianwali and Attock districts of the Punjab province, areas of Gilgit-Baltistan and in Islamabad. Pashto speakers are found in other major cities of Pakistan, most notably Karachi, Sindh,[21][22][23][24] which may have the largest Pashtun population of any city in the world.[25]

Other communities of Pashto speakers are found in India, Tajikistan,[26] and northeastern Iran (primarily in South Khorasan Province to the east of Qaen, near the Afghan border).[27] In India most ethnic Pashtun (Pathan) peoples speak the geographically native Hindi-Urdu language rather than Pashto, but there are small numbers of Pashto speakers, such as the Sheen Khalai in Rajasthan,[28] and the Pathan community in the city of Kolkata, often nicknamed the Kabuliwala ("people of Kabul").[29][30] Pashtun diaspora communities in other countries around the world speak Pashto, especially the sizable communities in the United Arab Emirates[31] and Saudi Arabia.

Some linguists have argued that Pashto is descended from Avestan or a variety very similar to it, while others have attempted to place it closer to Bactrian.[61][62][63] However, neither position is universally agreed upon. What scholars do agree on is the fact that Pashto is an Eastern Iranian language sharing characteristics with Eastern Middle Iranian languages such as Bactrian, Khwarezmian and Sogdian.[64][65]

Compare with other Eastern Iranian Languages and Old Avestan:

Strabo, who lived between 64 BC and 24 CE, explains that the tribes inhabiting the lands west of the Indus River were part of Ariana. This was around the time when the area inhabited by the Pashtuns was governed by the Greco-Bactrian Kingdom. From the 3rd century CE onward, they are mostly referred to by the name Afghan (Abgan).[72][73][74][7]

Abdul Hai Habibi believed that the earliest modern Pashto work dates back to Amir Kror Suri of the early Ghurid period in the 8th century, and they use the writings found in Pata Khazana. Pə́ṭa Xazāná (پټه خزانه) is a Pashto manuscript[75] claimed to be written by Mohammad Hotak under the patronage of the Pashtun emperor Hussain Hotak in Kandahar; containing an anthology of Pashto poets. However, its authenticity is disputed by scholars such as David Neil MacKenzie and Lucia Serena Loi.[76][77] Nile Green comments in this regard:[78]

"In 1944, Habibi claimed to have discovered an eighteenth-century manuscript anthology containing much older biographies and verses of Pashto poets that stretched back as far as the eighth century. It was an extraordinary claim, implying as it did that the history of Pashto literature reached back further in time than Persian, thus supplanting the hold of Persian over the medieval Afghan past. Although it was later convincingly discredited through formal linguistic analysis, Habibi's publication of the text under the title Pata Khazana ('Hidden Treasure') would (in Afghanistan at least) establish his reputation as a promoter of the wealth and antiquity of Afghanistan's Pashto culture."

— Afghan History Through Afghan Eyes

From the 16th century, Pashto poetry become very popular among the Pashtuns. Some of those who wrote in Pashto are Bayazid Pir Roshan (a major inventor of the Pashto alphabet), Khushal Khan Khattak, Rahman Baba, Nazo Tokhi, and Ahmad Shah Durrani, founder of the modern state of Afghanistan or the Durrani Empire. The Pashtun literary tradition grew in the backdrop to weakening Pashtun power following Mughal rule: Khushal Khan Khattak used Pashto poetry to rally for Pashtun unity and Pir Bayazid as an expedient means to spread his message to the Pashtun masses.[79]

For instance Khushal Khattak laments in :[80]

"The Afghans (Pashtuns) are far superior to the Mughals at the sword,

Were but the Afghans, in intellect, a little discreet. If the different tribes would but support each other,

Kings would have to bow down in prostration before them"

— Khushal Khan Khattak, Selections from the Poetry of the Afghans

Pashto is a subject–object–verb (SOV) language with split ergativity. In Pashto, this means that the verb agrees with the subject in transitive and intransitive sentences in non-past, non-completed clauses, but when a completed action is reported in any of the past tenses, the verb agrees with the subject if it is intransitive, but with the object if it is transitive.[14] Verbs are inflected for present, simple past, past progressive, present perfect, and past perfect tenses. There is also an inflection for the subjunctive mood.

Nouns and adjectives are inflected for two genders (masculine and feminine),[81] two numbers (singular and plural), and four cases (direct, oblique, ablative, and vocative). The possessor precedes the possessed in the genitive construction, and adjectives come before the nouns they modify.

Unlike most other Indo-Iranian languages, Pashto uses all three types of adpositions—prepositions, postpositions, and circumpositions.

In Pashto, most of the native elements of the lexicon are related to other Eastern Iranian languages.[65] As noted by Josef Elfenbein, "Loanwords have been traced in Pashto as far back as the third century B.C., and include words from Greek and probably Old Persian".[87] For instance, Georg Morgenstierne notes the Pashto word مېچن mečә́n i.e. a hand-mill as being derived from the Ancient Greek word μηχανή (mēkhanḗ, i.e. a device).[88] Post-7th century borrowings came primarily from Persian and Hindi-Urdu, with Arabic words being borrowed through Persian,[89] but sometimes directly.[90][91] Modern speech borrows words from English, French, and German.[92]

However, a remarkably large number of words are unique to Pashto.[93][94]

Here is an exemplary list of Pure Pashto and borrowings:[95][96][97][98][99]

Due to the incursion of Persian and Persianized-Arabic in modern speech, linguistic purism of Pashto is advocated to prevent its own vocabulary from dying out.[94][100][101]

Pashto employs the Pashto alphabet, a modified form of the Perso-Arabic alphabet or Arabic script.[107] In the 16th century, Bayazid Pir Roshan introduced 13 new letters to the Pashto alphabet. The alphabet was further modified over the years.

The Pashto alphabet consists of 45 to 46 letters[108] and 4 diacritic marks. Latin Pashto is also used.[109][110][111] In Latin transliteration, stress is represented by the following markers over vowels: ә́, á, ā́, ú, ó, í and é. The following table (read from left to right) gives the letters' isolated forms, along with possible Latin equivalents and typical IPA values:

Pashto dialects are divided into two categories, the "soft" southern grouping of Paṣ̌tō, and the "hard" northern grouping of Pax̌tō (Pakhtu).[112] Each group is further divided into a number of dialcets. The Southern dialect of Tareeno is the most distinctive Pashto dialect.

1. Southern variety

• Abdaili or Kandahar dialect (or South Western dialect)
• Kakar dialect (or South Eastern dialect)
• Shirani dialect
• Mandokhel dialect
• Marwat-Bettani dialect
• Southern Karlani group

• Khattak dialect
• Wazirwola dialect

• Dawarwola dialect
• Masidwola dialect

• Banisi (Banu) dialect

2. Northern variety

• Central Ghilji dialect (or North Western dialect)
• Yusapzai and Momand dialect (or North Eastern dialect)
• Northern Karlani group

• Wardak dialect
• Taniwola dialect
• Mangal tribe dialect
• Khosti dialect
• Zadran dialect
• Bangash-Orakzai-Turi-Zazi dialect
• Afridi dialect
• Khogyani dialect

3. Tareeno Dialect

Literary Pashto is the artificial variety of Pashto which is used at times as literary register of Pashto. It is said to be based on the North Western dialect, spoken in the central Ghilji region. Literary Pashto's vocabulary, also derives from other dialects.[86]

Pashto-speakers have long had a tradition of oral literature, including proverbs, stories, and poems. Written Pashto literature saw a rise in development in the 17th century mostly due to poets like Khushal Khan Khattak (1613–1689), who, along with Rahman Baba (1650–1715), is widely regarded as among the greatest Pashto poets. From the time of Ahmad Shah Durrani (1722–1772), Pashto has been the language of the court. The first Pashto teaching text was written during the period of Ahmad Shah Durrani by Pir Mohammad Kakar with the title of Maʿrifat al-Afghānī ("The Knowledge of Afghani [Pashto]"). After that, the first grammar book of Pashto verbs was written in 1805 under the title of Riyāż al-Maḥabbah ("Training in Affection") through the patronage of Nawab Mahabat Khan, son of Hafiz Rahmat Khan, chief of the Barech. Nawabullah Yar Khan, another son of Hafiz Rahmat Khan, in 1808 wrote a book of Pashto words entitled ʿAjāyib al-Lughāt ("Wonders of Languages").

• Schmidt, Rüdiger, ed. (1989). Compendium Linguarum Iranicarum. Wiesbaden: Reichert. ISBN 3-88226-413-6.
• Georg Morgenstierne (1926) Report on a Linguistic Mission to Afghanistan. Instituttet for Sammenlignende Kulturforskning, Serie C I-2. Oslo. ISBN 0-923891-09-9
• Daniel G. Hallberg (1992) Pashto, Waneci, Ormuri (Sociolinguistic Survey of Northern Pakistan, 4). National Institute of Pakistani Studies, 176 pp. ISBN 969-8023-14-3.
• Herbert Penzl A Grammar of Pashto: A Descriptive Study of the Dialect of Kandahar, Afghanistan, ISBN 0-923891-72-2
• Herbert Penzl A Reader of Pashto, ISBN 0-923891-71-4

• Morgenstierne, Georg. "The Place of Pashto among the Iranic Languages and the Problem of the Constitution of Pashtun Linguistic and Ethnic Unity." Paṣto Quarterly 1.4 (1978): 43-55.

Pashto edition of Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Pashto language.

Look up pashto in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Wikivoyage has a phrasebook for Pashto.

• Pashto Dictionary with Phonetic Keyboard & Auto-Suggestion
• Pashto Phonetic Keyboard
• Pashto Language & Identity Formation in Pakistan
• Indo-Aryan identity of Pashto
• Henry George Raverty. A Dictionary of the Puk'hto, Pus'hto, or Language of the Afghans. Second edition, with considerable additions. London: Williams and Norgate, 1867.
• D. N. MacKenzie, "A Standard Pashto", Khyber.org
• Freeware Online Pashto Dictionaries
• A Pashto Word List
• Origins of Pashto
• Resources for the Study of the Pashto Language