Pashto language

Pashto (پښتو '; also known as Afghan, Pathan, Pakhto, Pushto, Pashtoe, Pashtu, Pushtu, Pashto' پشتو and Pukhto پختو ) is the language spoken by the Pashtun people who inhabit Afghanistan, the western provinces of Pakistan, and by the Pathans'' of northern India.

History

The language is believed to have originated in the Kandahar/Helmand areas of Afghanistan. Dari often dominates over Afghan/Pashto in Afghanistan in everyday government use since the capital was moved to Kabul from Kandahar in the 18th century. Pashto is, along with Persian (Dari), one of the two official languages of Afghanistan. It is spoken by ca 35% of Afghanistan's population as a mother tongue, according to the CIA, but this figure requires corroboration from a census that has not taken place in Afghanistan in decades. Pashto speakers in Pakistan range from 16% to as much as 20% of the population (including Afghan refugees), but an accurate census remains elusive due to the tribal and migratory nature of Pashtuns and their habit of secluding women.

Classification

Pashto is classified within the Eastern Iranian branch of the Indo-European languages. Other notable related tongues include Ossetic, spoken in the Caucasus.

Geographic distribution

Pashto is spoken by about 12 million people in the south, east and a few northern provinces of Afghanistan and over 28 million in the Northwest Frontier Province, Federally Administered Tribal Areas, and Balochistan.href="http://articles.gourt.com/http///www.statpak.gov.pk/depts/pco/statistics/other_tables/pop_by_mother_tongue.pdf Smaller, modern "transplant" communities are also found in //www.statpak.gov.pk/depts/pco/statistics/other_tables/pop_by_mother_tongue.pdf Smaller, modern "transplant" communities are also found in Sindh (Karachi">Sindh">//www.statpak.gov.pk/depts/pco/statistics/other_tables/pop_by_mother_tongue.pdf Smaller, modern "transplant" communities are also found in Sindh (Karachi, Hyderabad). Other smaller communities peopled by Pashtun invaders in the past centuries, exist in Northern India (Pathankot, Rampur) and northeastern Iran. It is spoken by a large part of Afghanistan population who are of the Pashtun tribe, as well as by ethnic Pashtuns who live in Pakistan.

Official status

Pashto became one of the official languages of Afghanistan as late as 1936. The other is Persian, known as Dari in Afghanistan. Pashto is also designated as one of nine official regional languages of Pakistan, making it as the official provincial language of Afghania or Suba-e-Sarhad, Pakistan around the Peshawar area.

Dialects

The northern dialect is spoken by about 24,000,000 people, and the southern dialect by about 16,000,000. One of the main features of the dialects are the differences in the pronunciation of these four phonemes (all sounds in IPA):

Southwest (Kandahar, Afghanistan):
- 1.
- 2.
- 3.
- 4.
Southeast (Quetta, Pakistan):
- 1.
- 2.
- 3.
- 4.
Northwest (Paktiya, Afghanistan):
- 1.
- 2.
- 3.
- 4.
Northeast (Jallalabad, Afghanistan):
- 1.
- 2.
- 3.
- 4.

The dialect of Kandahar is the most conservative with regards to phonology which retains both the dental affricates and the retroflex fricatives which have not merged with other phonemes.

Sounds

Vowels

Diphthongs:

Consonants

Stops:

Affricates:

Fricatives:

Approximants:

Trills:

Nasals:

Lateral Approximants:

Phonology

Historical sound changes

Grammar

Pashto is a S-O-V language. 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 Arabic, Persian and various Turkic languages.

Writing system

From the time of Islam's rise in Central Asia, Pashto has used a modified version of Perso-Arabic script. In recent years, however, because of the Internet, it has become increasingly popular to write Pashto in the Latin script. Pashto has several letters which do not appear in any other Perso-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" attached underneath which looks like a small circle. They also have 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 Persian has added to the Arabic alphabet. See http://www.khpalapashtu.com/sitee/pashtula/pasalph.htm to view the entire alphabet.

Examples

Note - The following transliterations represent the Kabuli dialect.

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

Command (you masculine-singular):

Maktab ta dza! or Maktab ta laarr sha!
School to go - Go to school!

Command (you masculine-plural):

Maktab ta laarr shey!
Go to school!

Simple Present:

zuh maktab ta dzum.
I school to go - I go to school.

Subjunctive:

zuh ghwaarum che maktab ta laarr shum.
I want that to school go (Masculine-I-verb form) - I want to go to school.

Persent Perfect:

zuh maktab ta tlilai yum.
I school to gone (Masculine verb form) am - I have gone to school.

Simple Past:

zuh maktab ta wolaarrum.
I school to went - I went to school.

Past Perfect:

zuh maktab ta tlilai wum.
I school to gone (Masculine verb form) was - I had gone to school.

Past Progressive:

zuh maktab ta tlilum.
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" "khwarril":

Command (You singular):

Paneer wokhuurra!
cheese eat - Eat the cheese!

Paneer muhkhuurra!
cheese no-eat - Don't eat the cheese!

Command (You plural):

Paneer wokhuurra!
cheese eat - Eat the cheese!

Paneer muhkhuurrey!
cheese no-eat - Don't eat the cheese!