Pashto language

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Pashto (pəʂ'to, also rendered as Pakhto, Pushto, Pukhto , Pashtoe, Pashtu, Pushtu, Pathani or Pushtoo and also known as Afghan language) is an Iranian language spoken by Pashtuns living in Afghanistan and western Pakistan. Although spoken by nearly 25 million people in various countries, it has been classified as a tribal tongue due to limited vocabulary, unstructured grammar and inconsistencies in syntax. However, some of the Pashto literature has been observed to follow modern literary trends.

Geographic distribution

Pashto is spoken by about 25 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) and by over 15 million people in the south, east, west and a few northern provinces of Afghanistan (ca. 40% of the total population). In Pakistan, smaller, modern "transplant" communities are also found in Sindh (Karachi, Hyderabad). Other smaller communities of Pashto speakers also thrive in northeastern Iran and in India, particularly in the Indian states of Uttar Pradesh and Jammu & Kashmir, where Pathan colonies were founded.

Official status

Pashto is the national and (along with Dari) one of the two official languages of Afghanistan and is widely spoken by pashtuns and other ethnic groups. It is not the official language in Pakistan, and is spoken by Pashtun communities in Pakistan's North West Frontier Province and Baluchistan Province .

Dialects

The northern dialect is spoken by about 6,000,000 people, and the southern dialect by about 1,500,000. One of the main 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.

Phonology

Vowels

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

Pashto also has the diphthongs

Consonants

	Labial	Dental	Retroflex	Palatal	Velar	Uvular	Glottal
Nasal	m	n	ɳ
Plosive						q	ʔ
Fricative							h
Affricate
Approximant		l		j	w
Rhotic		r	ɺ̢

The sounds are present only in loanwords. Less educated speakers tend to replace them with [p], [k] and nothing, respectively.

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

Historical sound changes

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. There is no definite article, but instead there is extensive use of the demonstratives this/that. The verb system is very intricate with the following: Simple 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.

Vocabulary

Pashto, being an Indo-European language, shares many cognates with other related languages. Following the advent of Islam in Afghanistan, the Pashto language has received a significant influx of loan-words from Greek, Arabic, Persian and various Turkic languages.

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 (generally in Pakistan) 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 which represent the retroflex versions of the consonants /t/, /d/, /r/, /n/. The letters are written like the standard Arabic ta', dal, ra', 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 ge and xin (the initial sound of which is like the German ch found in the word "ich") which look like a ra' and sin respectively with a dot above and beneath. Pashto also has the extra letters that has been added to the Arabic alphabet. It has a number of additional vowel diacritics as well, though these often vary in their usage.

Alphabet

The letters of the Pashto alphabet are:

^{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 ۀ و ؤ ى ئ ي ې ۍ}

Examples

Note - The following transliterations represent the Kabuli dialect.

Examples of intransitive sentence forms using the verb "to go" "tləl":

Command (you masculine-singular):

khawanze/shawanze (ښوونځى) ta dza! or khawanze/shawanze ta lāṛ ša!
School to go - Go to school!

Command (you masculine-plural):

khawanze/shawanze ta lāṛ šəy!
Go to school!

Simple Present:

zə khawanze/shawanze ta dzəm.
I school to go - I go to school.

zə ğwāṛəm če khawanze/shawanze ta lāṛ šəm.
I want that to school go (Masculine-I-verb form) - I want to go to school.

Present Perfect:

zə khawanze/shawanze ta tləlay yəm.
I school to gone (Masculine verb form) am - I have gone to school.

Simple Past:

zə khawanze/shawanze ta wəlāṛəm.
I school to went - I went to school.

Past Perfect:

zə khawanze/shawanze ta tləlay wəm.
I school to gone (Masculine verb form) was - I had gone to school.

Past Progressive:

zə khawanze/shawanze ta makh kay talay um"
I school to was going - I was going to school or I used to go to school

Examples of transative sentence forms using the verb "to eat" "xwaṛəl":

Command (You singular):

Panir wəxora!
cheese eat - Eat the cheese!

Panir məxora!
cheese no-eat - Don't eat the cheese!

Command (You plural):

Panir wəxorəy!
cheese eat - Eat the cheese!

Panir məxorəy!
cheese no-eat - Don't eat the cheese!

Simple Present:

zə panir xorəm.
I cheese eat - I eat cheese.

Subjunctive:

zə ğwāṛəm če panir wəxorəm.
I want that cheese eat (I-verb form) - I want to eat cheese.

Present Perfect: ما پنېر خوړلی دی

mā panir xoṛəlay day.
me (I-oblique) cheese eaten (masculine-singular verb form) is - I have eaten cheese.

Simple Past:

mā panir wəxoṛə.
me (I-oblique) cheese ate - I ate cheese

Past Perfect:

mā panir xoṛəlay wo.
me (I-oblique) cheese eaten (masculine-singular verb form) was - I had eaten cheese.

Past Progressive:

mā panir xoṛə.
me (I oblique) cheese was eating (masculine-singular verb form) - I was eating cheese or I used to eat cheese.

Questions Stā num tsə day your name what is - what is your name

Bibliography

Schmidt, Rüdiger (ed.) (1989). Compendium Linguarum Iranicarum. Wiesbaden: Reichert. ISBN 3-88226-413-6.

Morgenstierne, Georg (1926) Report on a Linguistic Mission to Afghanistan. Instituttet for Sammenlignende Kulturforskning, Serie C I-2. Oslo. ISBN 0-923891-09-9