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| Pashto پښتو paʂto | ||
|---|---|---|
| Spoken in: | Pakistan: western provinces; Afghanistan: south and east.University of Texas in Austin - Ethnolinguistic Groups in Afghanistan...Link | |
| Region: | South-Central Asia | |
| Total speakers: | approx. 20-25 millionEthnologue Report for Pashto | |
| Ranking: | 82 (Northern), 92 (Southern)David P. Brown: Top 100 Languages by Population | |
| Language family: | Indo-European Indo-Iranian Iranian Southeastern Pashto | |
| Official status | ||
| Official language in: | Afghanistan (national along with Dari) 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. | ||
Pashto (پښتو, IPA: [pəʂ\'to], also rendered as Pakhto, Pushto, Pukhto پختو, Pashtoe, Pashtu, Pushtu, Pathani or Pushtoo and also known as Afghan language"afghan." The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. Houghton Mifflin Company, 2004. 03 Jan. 2008.
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Geographic distribution of Pashto (purple) and other Iranian languages
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)Government of Pakistan: Population by Mother Tongue and by over 15 million people in the south, east, west and a few northern provinces of Afghanistan (ca. 40% of the total population).CIA -The World Factbook -- Afghanistan 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.Study of the Pathan Communities in four States of India. Dawat. Retrieved on 2007-01-05.Pathan. Lucknow for Jesus. Retrieved on 2007-01-05.
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.Chapter One, Article Sixteen of the Constitution of Afghanistan It is not the official language in Pakistan, and is spoken by Pashtun communities in Pakistan\'s North West Frontier Province and Baluchistan Province .
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.
| Front | Central | Back | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Close | i | u | |
| Mid | e | ə | o |
| Open | ɑ |
Pashto also has the diphthongs /aj/ /əj/ /aw/
| 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 | j | w | |||||
| Rhotic | r | ɺ̢ |
The sounds /f/, /q/, /h/ 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.
| This short section requires expansion. |
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.
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.
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.
The letters of the Pashto alphabet are:Pashto Alphabet TablePashto Alphabet Table
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
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This article contains only non-IPA pronunciation information which should be expanded with the International Phonetic Alphabet. For assistance, see Wikipedia:Manual of Style (pronunciation). |
Examples of intransitive sentence forms using the verb "to go" "tləl":
Command (you masculine-singular):
Command (you masculine-plural):
Simple Present:
Present Perfect:
Simple Past:
Past Perfect:
Past Progressive:
Examples of transative sentence forms using the verb "to eat" "xwaṛəl":
Command (You singular):
Command (You plural):
Simple Present:
Subjunctive:
Present Perfect: ما پنېر خوړلی دی
Simple Past:
Past Perfect:
Past Progressive:
Questions Stā num tsə day your name what is - what is your name
Pashto language edition of Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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