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Pashto
پښتو
Pronunciation	[paʂˈto], , Pashto
Writing system	Pashto alphabet
Official status
Official language in	Afghanistan  Pakistan (K.P. and FATA)
Regulated by	Academy of Sciences of Afghanistan
Language codes
ISO 639-1	ps
ISO 639-2	pus
ISO 639-3	pus – Pashto (generic)

Pashto (Naskh: پښتو - [paʂˈto]; also transliterated Pakhto, Pushto, Pukhto, Pashtu, or Pushtu), also known as Afghani, is an Iranian language spoken primarily by the Pashtun people in Afghanistan and northwestern Pakistan, as well as by the Pashtun diaspora across the globe.

Pashto belongs to the Eastern Iranian languages branch of the Indo-Iranian language family. The number of Pashto speakers is estimated to be near 50 million people world wide. The Constitution of Afghanistan declares Pashto as one of the two official languages of the country, the other being Dari (Persian).

Geographic distribution

In Afghanistan, Pashto is primarily spoken in the east, south, southwest, but also in parts of northern, western and northwestern of the country. No exact numbers are available, but estimates are that Pashto is the first language of 35% to 50% of the total population of Afghanistan.

Pashto is spoken in neighboring Pakistan by about 12.42% of the total population , mainly in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and in northwestern Balochistan, as well as in parts of Mianwali and Attock districts of the Punjab province. Modern Pashto-speaking communities are also found in the cities of Karachi and Hyderabad in Sindh. With close to 7 million ethnic Pashtuns by some estimates, Karachi has the largest Pashtun population in the world.

Other communities of Pashto speakers are found in northeastern Iran, primarily in South Khorasan Province to the east of Qaen, near the Afghan border, and in Tajikistan. There are also Pashtun communities in the southwestern part of Jammu and Kashmir as well as in Uttar Pradesh, India.

Sizable Pashto-speaking communities also exist in the Middle East, especially in the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, as well as in the United States, United Kingdom, Thailand, Canada, Germany, Netherland, Sweden, Qatar and Australia.

Official Status

Pashto enjoys official status in Afghanistan alongside Dari Persian, with full rights to usage in all aspects of government and education within respective natural linguistic borders. In Pakistan, Pashto is not an official language but one of the provincial languages spoken by the ethnic Pashtuns in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Federally Administered Tribal Areas, Balochistan, and in cities of other provinces where large number of Pashtun communities exist.

Grammar

Pashto is an SOV (Subject-Object-Verb) language with split ergativity. Adjectives come before nouns. Nouns and adjectives are inflected for two genders (masc./fem.), two numbers (sing./plur.), and four cases (direct, oblique I, oblique II and vocative). The verb system is very intricate with the following tenses: present, simple past, past progressive, present perfect and past perfect. There is also an inflection for the subjunctive mood.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

Pashto also has the diphthongs /ai/, /əi/, /ɑw/, /aw/.

Consonants

The phonemes /q/, /f/ tend to be replaced by , .

The retroflex lateral flap /ɺ̢/ (//) is pronounced as retroflex approximant when final.

The retroflex fricatives /ʂ/, /ʐ/ that are preserved in southern dialects are replaced by palatal fricatives , in west-central dialects, velars , in northern dialects, and postalveolars , in southeastern dialects.

The velars /k/, /ɡ/, /x/, /ɣ/ followed by the close back rounded vowel /u/ assimilate into the labialized velars , , , .

Vocabulary

In Pashto, most of the native elements of the lexicon are related to other Eastern Iranian languages; those words can be easily compared to those known from Avestan, Ossetic and Pamir languages. However, a remarkably large number of words is special to Pashto. Post 7th century borrowings came primarily from Arabic, Persian and Hindustani language, with the modern educated speech borrowing words from English, French, and German.

Writing system

Pashto employs the Pashto alphabet, a modified form of the Persian alphabet which on its part is derived from the Arabic alphabet. It has extra letters for Pashto-specific sounds. Since the 17th century Pashto has been primarily written in the Naskh script, rather than the Nasta'liq script used for neighboring Persian and Urdu languages. The Pashto alphabet consists of 45 letters, and 4 diacritic marks. The following table gives the letters' isolated forms, along with IPA values for the letters' typical sounds:

Pashto is written from right to left.

Dialects

As a consequence of life in areas of rugged terrain, there are many accents of the Pashto language. The two main dialects are soft or southern accent and hard or northern dialect. The dividing line passes through Paktika. One of the primary features of the dialects is the difference in the pronunciation of these seven phonemes (all sounds in IPA):

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 east-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.

Notable phonological and lexicological differences

See also

• Iranian Languages vocabulary comparison table
• Pashto alphabet
• List of Pashto language poets
• List of Pashto language singers
• Pre-Islamic scripts in Afghanistan

Notes and references

1. University of Texas at Austin - Ethnolinguistic Groups in Afghanistan
2. ^ "Pashto, Northern". SIL International. Ethnologue: Languages of the World. June 2010. Retrieved 2010-09-18. Ethnic population: 49,529,000 possibly total Pashto in all countries.
3. Dictionary.com, "Afghani," in The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. Source location: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2004. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/Afghani. Accessed: July 14, 2010.
4. UCLA Language Materials Project: Language Profile
5. Nicholas Sims-Williams, "Eastern Iranian Languages", Encyclopaedia Iranica Online, available at www.iranica.com, Link
6. Constitution of Afghanistan - Chapter 1 The State, Article 16 (Languages) and Article 20 (Anthem)
7. Banting, Erinn (2003). Afghanistan: The land. Crabtree Publishing Company. p. 4. ISBN 0778793354. Retrieved 2010-08-22. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help); More than one of |pages= and |page= specified (help)
8. "General Information About Afghanistan". Abdullah Qazi. Afghanistan Online. Retrieved 2010-09-27.
9. "The Afghans - Language and Literacy". Center for Applied Linguistics (CAL). June 30, 2002. Retrieved 2010-09-16.
10. "A survey of the Afghan people - Afghanistan in 2006", The Asia Foundation, technical assistance by the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS; India) and Afghan Center for Socio-economic and Opinion Research (ACSOR), Kabul, 2006, PDF
11. "Languages: Afghanistan". CIA. CIA World Factbook. Retrieved 2010-09-18. Afghan Persian or Dari (official) 50%, Pashto (official) 35%, Turkic languages (primarily Uzbek and Turkmen) 11%, 30 minor languages (primarily Balochi and Pashai) 4%, much bilingualism
12. ^ "Pashto, Southern: a language of Afghanistan". SIL International. Ethnologue: Languages of the World. Retrieved 2010-09-18.
13. Government of Pakistan: Population by Mother Tongue
14. Ethnologue: Languages of the World - Languages of Iran
15. Walter R Lawrence, Imperial Gazetteer of India. Provincial Series, pg 36-37, Link
16. "Study of the Pathan Communities in four States of India". Khyber. Retrieved 2009-06-07.
17. "Phonemic Inventory of Pashto" (PDF). CRULP. Retrieved 2007-06-07.
18. Ethnologue: Languages of the World - Languages of United Arab Emirates
19. Ethnologue: Languages of the World - Languages of United Kingdom
20. Emeneau, M. B. (1962) "Bilingualism and Structural Borrowing" Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 106(5): pp. 430-442, p. 441
21. Michael M.T. Henderson, Four Varieties of Pashto
22. G. Morgenstierne, "'AFGHANISTAN vi. Paṧtō'", Encyclopaedia Iranica Online, available at www.iranica.com, Link
23. Vladimir Kushev (1997). "Areal Lexical Contacts of the Afghan (Pashto) Language (Based on the Texts of the XVI-XVIII Centuries)". Iran and the Caucasus. 1. Brill: 159–166. Retrieved 2009-06-07.
24. "Census of India, 1931, Volume 17, Part 2". Times of India. 1937. Retrieved 2009-06-07. At the same time Pashto has borrowed largely from Persian and Hindustani, and through those languages from Arabic. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
25. ^ Herbert Penzl (January -March 1961). "Western Loanwords in Modern Pashto". Journal of the American Oriental Society. 81 (1): 43–52. doi:10.2307/594900. {{cite journal}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
26. Hallberg, Daniel G. 1992. Pashto, Waneci, Ormuri. Sociolinguistic Survey of Northern Pakistan, 4.

Bibliography

• Schmidt, Rüdiger (ed.) (1989). Compendium Linguarum Iranicarum. Wiesbaden: Reichert. ISBN 3-88226-413-6. {{cite book}}: |first= has generic name (help)
• Gusain, Lakhan (2008??) " A Grammar of Pashto". Ann Arbor, MI: Northside Publishers. ISBN ??
• Georg Morgenstierne (1926) Report on a Linguistic Mission to Afghanistan. Instituttet for Sammenlignende Kulturforskning, Serie C I-2. Oslo. ISBN 0-923891-09-9
• Herbert Penzl A Grammar of Pashto A Descriptive Study of the Dialect of Kandahar, Afghanistan ISBN 0923891722
• Herbert Penzl A Reader of Pashto ISBN 0923891714

External links

• H. G. Raverty. A Dictionary of the Puk'hto, Pus'hto, or Language of the Afghans. Second edition, with considerable additions. London: Williams and Norgate, 1867.
• The Pashto software localization and development
• پښتو ليکلاﺭ ښود, by Prof Zyar (Pashto)
• D. N. MacKenzie, "A Standard Pashto", Khyber.org
• Orthography and Phonemes in Pashto (Afghan)
• Freeware Online Pashto Dictionaries
• A Pashto Word List

• Pashto language
• Languages of Afghanistan
• Languages of Pakistan
• Languages of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas
• Languages of Balochistan (Pakistan)
• Indo-European languages
• SOV languages