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Pashto پښتو paʂto
Spoken in:	Afghanistan: south, east, and some parts of north and west; Pakistan: western provinces (NWFP, Baluchistan), ¹ in India by Afghan Hindus and Sikhs as well as others who have claimed asylum.
Region:	South-Central Asia

Total speakers:	approx. 38 million
Ranking:	82 (Northern), 92 (Southern)²
Language family:	Indo-European Indo-Iranian Iranian Eastern Iranian Pashto
Writing system:	Naskh, Latin
Official status
Official language in:	Afghanistan Pakistan (provincial)
Regulated by:	no official regulation
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
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode.

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):

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

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

	Front	Central	Back
Close	i		u
Mid	e	ə	o
Open		ɑ

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 ʔ or nothing, respectively.

Vocabulary

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 for example the letters representing retroflex of the consonants /t/, /d/, /r/ and /n/. These letters are written like the standard Arabic te, dal, re 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 ssin and zze (representing retroflex of the consonants /s/ and /z/ in the Kandahari dialect) which look like a sin and re respectively with a dot above and beneath. It has a number of additional vowel diacritics as well, though these often vary in their usage. The Pashto letters ye, tse, dzim and jim are romanized as Jj, Cc, Xx and XHxh respectively.

The Pashto Latin alphabet is: Aa Bb Cc CHch Dd DDdd Ee Əə Ff Gg GHgh Hh Ii Jj Kk KHkh Ll Mm Nn NNnn Oo Pp Qq Rr RRrr Ss SSss SHsh Tt TTtt Uu Vv Ww Xx XHxh Yy Zz ZZzz ZHzh.

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