Pashto

Pashto

pashto

Spoken in south-central Asia, Pashto (also sometimes written as Pushtu) is mainly the language of Pashtuns (Afghans). The Pashtun diaspora is located in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The language shares similarities with Farsi (Persian) and Dari. Understanding the differences between Afghan Pashto and Pakistani Pashtu might not be very difficult for someone who has lived in the relevant areas of Afghanistan or Pakistan; however, detecting the differences poses difficulties for project managers when they want to assign this language. So, here is some information about it.

Pashto Quick Facts:

  • The Pushtu language, also sometimes referred to as Pakhto, Pashtu, and Pushto, is the native language of the Pushtun people.
  • Pashto has been written in a variant of the Persian script since the late sixteenth century.
  • Since 1936, Pushtu has served as one of the official languages of Afghanistan.
  • Significant Pushtu-speaking communities also can be found in Tajikistan, the United Arab Emirates, Kyrgyzstan and even the United Kingdom as well as by a large diaspora encompassing India, Iran and the United States, Thailand, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, Qatar, Australia, Japan, Russia, New Zealand, etc.
  • Pashto has different dialects such as Ghandehari, Ghalzaie, Benouchi (Peshawar), Afaridi (Waziri) and Pishawari. From perspective of phonetics, terminology and grammar we can categorize Pashto into:
    • Western (Ghandehari)
    • Eastern (Jalal Abadi and Peshawari)
    • Southern (Paktiayee and Vazirestani)
  • Important dialect of West is Ghandehari and in East it is Pishawari. The difference of these two categories are in the pronunciation of vowels and parts of grammar. Even the name of language in Ghandehari is pronounced as “Pashto” while in Pishawari it is pronounced as “Pakhto”(The guttural ‘’Kh”).
  • Pashto dialects are divided into two varieties, the “soft” southern variety Paṣ̌tō, and the “hard” northern variety Pax̌tō (Pakhtu). Each variety is further divided into a number of dialects. The southern dialect of Wanetsi is the most distinctive Pashto dialect.
  • Southern variety
    • Durrani dialect (or Southern dialect)
    • Kakar dialect (or Southeastern dialect)
    • Shirani dialect
    • Marwat-Bettani dialect
    • Wanetsi dialect
    • Southern Karlani group
    • Khattak dialect
    • Banuchi dialect
    • Dawarwola dialect
    • Masidwola dialect
    • Wazirwola dialect
  • Northern variety
    • Central Ghilji dialect (or Northwestern dialect)
    • Northern dialect (or Eastern dialect)
    • Yusufzai dialect (or Northeastern dialect)
    • Northern Karlani group
    • Taniwola dialect
    • Khosti dialect
    • Zadran dialect
    • Bangash-Orakzai-Turi-Zazi-Mangal dialect
    • Afridi dialect
    • Khogyani dialect
    • Wardak dialect
  • Southern Pashto is spoken by 6 million people in Afghanistan
  • Northern Pashto is spoken by 9.6 million people In Pakistan
  • Pashto employs the Pashto alphabet, a modified form of the Persian alphabet, which in 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. The Pashto alphabet consists of 44 letters and 4 diacritic marks.
  • Lexical similarity between Northern and Southern Pashto is estimated at approximately 80%.
  • Pashto nouns, adjectives, and pronouns are marked for the following categories:
    • two genders: masculine and feminine
    • two numbers: singular and plural, with a variety of plural markers
    • three cases: direct, oblique, and vocative (only in the singular). Cases are marked with prefixes, suffixes or both. Direct case is used for both subjects and objects.
  • There are no articles.
  • There are three declensions for nouns, and five for adjectives.
  • There are first and second-person pronouns. Third person is represented by proximate and remote demonstrative pronouns (similar to ‘this’ and ‘yonder’)
  • All modifiers agree with the nouns they modify in gender, number, and case.
  • Pushto distinguishes two grammatical genders as well as singular and plural. There are generally two nominal cases in Pushto, although the vocative case is still used with singular nouns. Case is marked both with suffixes and with changes in the vowel of the noun stem and stress. Verbs agree with their subjects in person, number, and grammatical gender as well as being marked for tense/aspect. Past tense transitive sentences are formed as ergative: in these, the object rather than the subject agrees with the verb, and weak pronoun objects rather than subjects are omitted if they are not emphatic.
  • Word order, which is very rigid, is subject-object-verb. As the language of an Islamic people, Pushto also contains a high number of borrowings from Arabic; among educated speakers, the Arabic plurals of borrowed nouns are frequently maintained.
  • Pashto spoken in Pakistan contains a great many loanwords from Urdu
  • While the roots of the Farsi language can be traced back to the Old Persian of the 6th century BC, Pushtu’s roots remain unclear and scholars have long debated the language’s origins.
  • Based on the characteristics of Pushtu evident today, it is apparent that Pushtu had contact with a number of ancient languages in its early development, including Greek, Parthian and Persia.
  • In more recent history, Pushtu has borrowed extensively from a number of other languages, such as the northwestern Indian languages of Prakrits and Sindhi.
  • The language has also absorbed a number of Arabic words or Persianized versions of the Arabic language (which has had an enormous influence on the development of Persian).
  • The earliest known example of literary Pushtu is poetry dating from as early as the 8th century.
  • Today the Pushtu language is concentrated primarily in Afghanistan and Pakistan
  • It may be spoken by around 50 million people worldwide
  • Approximately 40 percent of the Afghan population speaks Pushtu, compared to the estimated 50 percent who speak Dari
  • Pushtu is found primarily in the North-West Frontier Province.
  • Modern Pushtu also includes a significant number of loanwords from Tajik, a dialect of Persian, and the Turkic language of Uzbek.
  • Pushtu vocabulary includes approximately 5,500 loanwords from Indian languages.
  • The Pushtu language is classified as a member of the Iranian subgroup of the Indo-Iranian group, part of the Indo-European family of languages. The Indo-Iranian language family is generally classified into three developmental phases: old, middle and modern.
  • Pashti is common in the South East, and South West of Afghanistan and has different variants two which are:
    • The East accent which has more of “گ” and “خ” sounds.
    • The West accent (Ghadehari) which has more of “چ” and “ش” sounds.

The word “Pashto” is said to be derived from Parsawā meaning “Persian” which makes it a Persian language however Pashtuns could also be compared with the Pakhta tribes mentioned in the Rigveda