Pashto

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Pashto (, rarely , Pashto: ????? Pax?t? ['p??t?o:]), sometimes spelled Pukhto, is the language of the Pashtuns. It is known in Persian literature as Afgh?ni (??????) and in Urdu and Hindi literature as Pa?h?n?. Speakers of the language are called Pashtuns or Pakhtuns and sometimes Afghans or Pathans. It is an Eastern Iranian language, belonging to the Indo-European family. Pashto is one of the two official languages of Afghanistan, and it is the second-largest regional language of Pakistan, mainly spoken in the west and northwest of the country. Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) are almost 100% Pashto-speaking, while it is the majority language of the province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and the northern districts of Balochistan. Along with Dari Persian, Pashto is the main language among the Pashtun diaspora around the world. The total number of Pashto-speakers is estimated to be 45-60 million people worldwide.

Pashto belongs to the Northeastern Iranian group of the Indo-Iranian branch, but Ethnologue lists it as Southeastern Iranian. Pashto has two main dialect groups, "soft" and "hard", the latter locally known as Pakhto or Paxto.

Video Pashto

Geographic distribution

As a national language of Afghanistan, Pashto is primarily spoken in the east, south, and southwest, but also in some northern and western parts of the country. The exact number of speaker is unavailable, but different estimates show that Pashto is the mother tongue of 45-60% of the total population of Afghanistan.

In Pakistan, around 26 million people speak Pashto, according to the 2006 census, which was around 15% of Pakistan's population at the time. Most of these people are in the northwestern areas of the country, including the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, northern Balochistan, and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. There are also many Pashtun speakers in the major cities of Pakistan.

Other communities of Pashto speakers are found in Tajikistan, and further in the Pashtun diaspora. There are also Hindu and Muslim communities of part Pashtun descent in India, including Bollywood families and Indian Film Cinema such as Khans and Kapoors. They are integrated into Indian languages, hold mixed races, ethnicities, religions and culture and do not hold cultural reverence to the ethnicity or their origins. Pashtuns are of ancient Iranian origin and lived in Afghanistan years before other ethnic groups in Afghanistan.

In addition, sizable Pashto-speaking communities also exist in the Middle East, especially in the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, northeastern Iran (primarily in South Khorasan Province to the east of Qaen, near the Afghan border). The Pashtun diaspora speaks Pashto in countries like the United States, United Kingdom, Thailand, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, Qatar, Australia, Japan, Russia, New Zealand, etc.

Afghanistan

Pashto is one of the two official languages of Afghanistan, along with Dari. Since the early 18th century, kings of Afghanistan were ethnic Pashtuns except for Habibull?h Kalak?ni in 1929. Persian, the literary language of the royal court, was more widely used in government institutions while Pashto was spoken by the Pashtun tribes as their native tongue. King Amanullah Khan began promoting Pashto during his reign as a marker of ethnic identity and a symbol of "official nationalism" leading Afghanistan to independence after the defeat of the British Empire in the Third Anglo-Afghan War in 1919. In the 1930s, a movement began to take hold to promote Pashto as a language of government, administration and art with the establishment of a Pashto Society Pashto Anjuman in 1931 and the inauguration of the Kabul University in 1932 as well as the formation of the Pashto Academy Pashto Tolana in 1937. Although officially strengthening the use of Pashto, the Afghan elite regarded Persian as a "sophisticated language and a symbol of cultured upbringing". King Zahir Shah thus followed suit after his father Nadir Khan had decreed in 1933, that both Persian and Pashto were to be studied and utilized by officials. In 1936, Pashto was formally granted the status of an official language with full rights to usage in all aspects of government and education by a royal decree under Zahir Shah despite the fact that the ethnically Pashtun royal family and bureaucrats mostly spoke Persian. Thus Pashto became a national language, a symbol for Afghan nationalism.

The status of official language was reaffirmed in 1964 by the constitutional assembly when Afghan Persian was officially renamed to Dari. The lyrics of the national anthem of Afghanistan are in Pashto.

Pashto is also the indigenous language of Afghanistan but Persian became popular in Afghanistan mainly because of the Persian empire and its influences. Persian was spoken all over.

Pakistan

In Pakistan, Pashto is spoken as a first language by about 35-40 million people - 15.42% of Pakistan's 170 million population. It is the main language of the Pashtun-majority regions of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Federally Administered Tribal Areas and northern Balochistan. It is also spoken in parts of Mianwali and Attock districts of the Punjab province and in Islamabad, as well as by Pashtuns who live in different cities throughout the country. Modern Pashto-speaking communities are found in the cities of Karachi and Hyderabad in Sindh.

Urdu and English are the two official languages of Pakistan. Pashto has no official status at the federal level. On a provincial level, Pashto is the regional language of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Federally Administered Tribal Areas and northern Balochistan. The primary medium of education in government schools in Pakistan is Urdu, but from 2014 onwards, the Government of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa has placed more emphasis on English as the medium of instruction. English-medium private schools in Pashto-speaking areas, however, generally do not use Pashto.

The imposition of Urdu as the primary medium of education in public schools has caused a systematic degradation and decline of many of Pakistan's native languages including Pashto. This has caused growing resentment amongst Pashtuns, who also complain that Pashto is often neglected officially.

Maps Pashto

History

According to 19th-century linguist James Darmesteter and modern linguist Michael M. T. Henderson, Pashto is "descended from Avestan". The Rabatak inscription of Emperor Kanishka written in Bactrian and Greek contains words are borrowed from Pashto language due to their proximity to the modern Pashto language.

Strabo, who lived between 64 BC and 24 CE, explains that the tribes inhabiting the lands west of the Indus River were part of Ariana and to their east was India. Since the 3rd century CE and onward, they are mostly referred to by the name Afghan (Abgan) and their language as "Afghani".

Scholars such as Abdul Hai Habibi and others believe that the earliest modern Pashto work dates back to Amir Kror Suri of Ghor in the eighth century, and they use the writings found in Pata Khazana. However, this is disputed by several modern experts such as David Neil MacKenzie and Lucia Serena Loi due to lack of evidence. Pata Khazana is a Pashto manuscript claimed to be first compiled during the Hotaki dynasty (1709-1738) in Kandahar, Afghanistan. Lucia Serena Loi considers Pata Khazana a late 19th century forgery.

From the 16th century, Pashto poetry become very popular among the Pashtuns. Some of those who wrote poetry in Pashto are Pir Roshan, Khushal Khan Khattak, Rahman Baba, Nazo Tokhi, and Ahmad Shah Durrani, founder of the modern state of Afghanistan or the Durrani Empire.

In modern times, noticing the incursion of Persian and Persianised-Arabic vocabulary, there is a strong desire to "purify" Pashto by restoring its old vocabulary.

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Grammar

Pashto is a subject-object-verb (SOV) 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). There is also an inflection for the subjunctive mood. The verb system is very intricate with the following tenses: present, simple past, past progressive, present perfect and past perfect. The sentence construction of Pashto has similarities with some other Indo-Iranian languages such as Prakrit and Bactrian. The possessor precedes the possessed in the genitive construction. The verb generally agrees with the subject in both transitive and intransitive sentences. An exception occurs when a completed action is reported in any of the past tenses (simple past, past progressive, present perfect or past perfect). In such cases, the verb agrees with the subject if it is intransitive, but if it is transitive, it agrees with the object, therefore Pashto shows a partly ergative behavior. Like Kurdish, but unlike most other Indo-Iranian languages, Pashto uses all three types of adpositions - prepositions, postpositions and circumpositions.

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Phonology

Vowels

Consonants

Phonemes that have been borrowed, thus non-native to Pashto, are colour-coded. The phonemes /q, f/ tend to be replaced by [k], [p].

The retroflex lateral flap /??/ (?? or ?) is pronounced as retroflex approximant [?] when final.

The retroflex fricatives /?, ?/ and palatal fricatives /ç, ?/ represent dialectally different pronunciations of the same sound, not separate phonemes. In particular, the retroflex fricatives, which represent the original pronunciation of these sounds, are preserved in the southern/southwestern dialects (especially the prestige dialect of Kandahar), while they are pronounced as palatal fricatives in the west-central dialects. Other dialects merge the original retroflexes with other existing sounds: The southeastern dialects merge them with the postalveolar fricatives /?, ?/, while the northern/northeastern dialects merge them with the velar phonemes in an asymmetric pattern, pronouncing them as /x, ?/ (not /?/). Furthermore, according to Henderson (1983), the west-central voiced palatal fricative /?/ actually occurs only in the Wardak Province, and is merged into /?/ elsewhere in the region.

The velars /k, ?, x, ?/ followed by the close back rounded vowel /u/ assimilate into the labialized velars [k?, ??, x?, ??].

Voiceless stops [p, t, t??, k] are all unaspirated, like Spanish, other Romance languages, and Austronesian languages; they have slightly aspirated allophones prevocalically in a stressed syllable.

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Vocabulary

In Pashto, most of the native elements of the lexicon are related to other Eastern Iranian languages. However, a remarkably large number of words are unique to Pashto. Post-7th century borrowings came primarily from the Persian and Hindustani languages, with some Arabic words being borrowed through those two languages, but sometimes directly. Modern speech borrows words from English, French and German.

Here is an exemplary list of Pure Pashto and borrowings:

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Writing system

Pashto employs the Pashto alphabet, a modified form of the Perso-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 Urdu alphabet and, to some degree, the Persian alphabet.

The Pashto alphabet consists of 45 letters and 4 diacritic marks. The following table gives the letters' isolated forms, along with the Latin equivalents and typical IPA values:

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Dialects

Pashto dialects are divided into two varieties, the "soft" southern variety Pa??t?, and the "hard" northern variety Pax?t? (Pakhtu). Each variety is further divided into a number of dialects. The southern dialect of Wanetsi is the most distinctive Pashto dialect.

1. 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

2. 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

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Literature

Pashto-speakers have long had a tradition of oral literature, including proverbs, stories, and poems. Written Pashto literature saw a rise in development in the 17th century mostly due to poets like Khushal Khan Khattak (1613-1689), who, along with Rahman Baba (1650-1715), is widely regarded as among the greatest Pashto poets. Both of these poets belonged to the modern day Khyber Pakhtunkhwa region of Pakistan). From the time of Ahmad Shah Durrani (1722-1772), Pashto has been the language of the court. The first Pashto teaching text was written during the period of Ahmad Shah Durrani by Pir Mohammad Kakar with the title of Ma?rifat al-Afgh?n? ("The Knowledge of Afghani [Pashto]"). After that, the first grammar book of Pashto verbs was written in 1805 in India under the title of Riy?? al-Ma?abbah ("Training in Affection") through the patronage of Nawab Mohabat Khan, son of Hafiz Rahmat Khan, chief of the Barech. Nawabullah Yar Khan, another son of Hafiz Rahmat Khan, in 1808 wrote a book of Pashto words entitled ?Aj?yib al-Lugh?t ("Wonders of Languages").

Poetry example

An excerpt from the Kal?m of Rahman Baba:

?? ????? ?? ???? ??? ?? ?? ??? ??
?? ?? ??? ???? ?? ???? ??? ?? ??

IPA: Z? ra.m?n p? xp?l.a gram j?m t??e ma.j?n j?m
t??e d?? nor ?o.pan me bo.li gram p? t?s?

Transliteration: Z? Rahm?n p? xp?la gram y?m ?e may?n y?m
?e d? nor ?opan me boli gram p? ts?

Translation: 'I Rahman, myself am guilty that I am a lover,
On what does this other universe call me guilty.'

Proverbs

Pashto also has a rich heritage of proverbs (Pashto matal?na, sg. matal). An example of a proverb:

???? ?? ???? ?? ??????

"One cannot divide water by [hitting it with] a pole."

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See also

• Indo-European languages
• Eastern Iranian languages
• Pre-Islamic scripts in Afghanistan
• Languages of Pakistan

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Notes

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References

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Bibliography

• Schmidt, Rüdiger (ed.) (1989). Compendium Linguarum Iranicarum. Wiesbaden: Reichert. ISBN 3-88226-413-6. CS1 maint: Extra text: authors list (link)
• Gusain, Lakhan (2008?) A Grammar of Pashto. Ann Arbor, MI: Northside Publishers.
• Georg Morgenstierne (1926) Report on a Linguistic Mission to Afghanistan. Instituttet for Sammenlignende Kulturforskning, Serie C I-2. Oslo. ISBN 0-923891-09-9
• Daniel G. Hallberg (1992) Pashto, Waneci, Ormuri (Sociolinguistic Survey of Northern Pakistan, 4). National Institute of Pakistani Studies, 176 pp. ISBN 969-8023-14-3.
• Herbert Penzl A Grammar of Pashto: A Descriptive Study of the Dialect of Kandahar, Afghanistan, ISBN 0-923891-72-2
• Herbert Penzl A Reader of Pashto, ISBN 0-923891-71-4

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External links

• Pashto Dictionary with Phonetic Keyboard & Auto-Suggestion
• Pashto Phonetic Keyboard
• Pashto Language & Identity Formation in Pakistan
• Indo-Aryan identity of Pashto
• Henry George Raverty. A Dictionary of the Puk'hto, Pus'hto, or Language of the Afghans. Second edition, with considerable additions. London: Williams and Norgate, 1867.
• D. N. MacKenzie, "A Standard Pashto", Khyber.org
• Freeware Online Pashto Dictionaries
• A Pashto Word List
• Origins of Pashto
• Resources for the Study of the Pashto Language

Source of the article : Wikipedia