Pashto language

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Pashto پښتو paʂto
Spoken in:	Pakistan: western provinces; Afghanistan: south, east, west and a few provinces in the north; India: Western provinces, Rajasthan, Gujarat.<ref>University of Texas in Austin - Ethnolinguistic Groups in Afghanistan...Link</ref>
Region:	South-Central Asia
Total speakers:	approx. 40-50 million <ref>Ethnologue Report for Pashto</ref>
Ranking:	82 (Northern),</br> 92 (Southern) <ref>David P. Brown: Top 100 Languages by Population</ref>
Language family:	Indo-European Indo-Iranian Iranian Southeastern Pashto
Official status
Official language of:	Pakistan (Provincial) </br>Afghanistan (National)</br>
Regulated by:	no official regulation
Language codes
ISO 639-1:	`ps`
ISO 639-2:	`pus`
ISO/FDIS 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. See IPA chart for English for an English-based pronunciation key.

Pashto (پښتو‎, IPA: [ p ə ʂ t o]; also known as Pakhto, Pushto, Pukhto, Pashtoe, Pashtu, Pushtu, Pushtoo, Pathan, or Afghan language and Pukhto پختو‎) is a language spoken by people living in the southern half of Afghanistan and western Pakistan.<ref>University of Texas in Austin - Ethnolinguistic Groups in Afghanistan...Link</ref>

1 Classification
2 Geographic distribution
- 2.1 Official status
- 2.2 Dialects
3 Sounds
4 Grammar
5 Vocabulary
6 Writing system
7 Examples
8 See also
9 Footnotes
10 External links

[edit] Classification

Pashto is classified within the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European languages. Other notable related tongues include Persian, Kurdish, Gileki, Hindi, Punjabi, and Ossetic, spoken in the Caucasus and South Asia.

[edit] Geographic distribution

Image:Moderniranianlanguagesmap24.PNG Pashto is spoken by about 18 million people in the western provinces of North-West Frontier Province, Federally Administered Tribal Areas, and Balochistan of Pakistan and by over 12 million people in the south, east, west and a few northern provinces of Afghanistan. <ref>Government of Pakistan: Population by Mother Tongue</ref> <ref>CIA -The World Factbook -- Afghanistan</ref>. Approximately 776,000 Pashtuns speak Pashto in small pockets of India. <ref>Pushtan, Southern of India</ref>. 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's population who are of the Pashtun tribe, as well as by ethnic Pashtuns who live in Pakistan.

[edit] Official status

Pashto or Afghani is one of the official languages in the western provinces of Pakistan as well as, the national language of Afghanistan as late as 1936. there is another language spoken locally in northern Afghanistan which is Persian, known as Dari its the official too in Afghanistan.

[edit] Dialects

The northern dialect is spoken by about 16,000,000 people, and the southern dialect by about 29,000,000. One of the main features of the dialects is the differences in the pronunciation of these four phonemes (all sounds in IPA):

Southwest (Kandahar, Afghanistan):
- 1. [ts]
- 2. [dz]
- 3. [ʂ]
- 4. [ʐ]
Southeast (Quetta, Pakistan):
- 1. [ts]
- 2. [dz]
- 3. [ʃ]
- 4. [ʒ]
Northwest (Paktiya, Afghanistan):
- 1. [s]
- 2. [z]
- 3. [ç]
- 4. [j]
Northeast (Jallalabad, Afghanistan):
- 1. [s]
- 2. [z]
- 3. [x]
- 4. [ɡ]

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.

[edit] Sounds

[edit] Vowels

[i], [e], [ə], [u], [o], [ɑ]

Diphthongs: [aj]

[edit] Consonants

Stops: [p], [b], [t], [d], [ʈ], [ɖ], [k], [ɡ], [q], [ʔ]

Affricates: [ts], [dz], [tʃ], [dʒ]

Fricatives: [f], [s], [z], [ʃ], [ʒ], [ʂ], [ʐ], [x], [ɣ], [h]

Approximants: [w], [j]

Trills: [r], [ɽ]

Nasals: [m], [n], [ɲ]

Lateral Approximants: [l]

[edit] Phonology

[edit] Historical sound changes

[edit] 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.

[edit] 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.

[edit] Writing system

From the time of Islam's rise in Central Asia, Pashto has used a modified version of Perso-Arabic script called the Nasta'liq script. In recent years, however, because of the Internet, it has become increasingly popular to write Pashto in the Roman 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; 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 Persian has added to the Arabic alphabet.

[edit] Examples

ə	This article contains nonstandard pronunciation information which should be rewritten using the International Phonetic Alphabet. Please see Wikipedia:Manual of Style (pronunciation) for help.

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.

Present 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!

Simple Present:

zuh paneer khuurrum.
I cheese eat - I eat cheese.

Subjunctive:

zuh ghwaarum che paneer wokhuurrum.
I want that cheese eat (I-verb form) - I want to eat cheese.

Present Perfect: ما پنېر خوړلی دی

maa paneer khwarrilai dai.
me (I-oblique) cheese eaten (masculine-singular verb form) is - I have eaten cheese.

Simple Past:

maa paneer wokhorro.
me (I-oblique) cheese ate - I ate cheese

Past Perfect:

maa paneer khwarrilai wo.
me (I-oblique) cheese eaten (masculine-singular verb form) was - I had eaten cheese.

Past Progressive:

maa paneer khwarruh.
me (I oblique) cheese was eating (masculine-singular verb form) - I was eating cheese or I used to eat cheese.

[edit] See also

[edit] Footnotes

[edit] External links

Image:Wikipedia-logo.png

Pashto language edition of Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

v • d • e</div> Indo-Iranian languages
Indo-Aryan	Sanskrit: Vedic Sanskrit - Classical Sanskrit \| Prakrit: Pāli - Magadhi \| Hindustani (Registers: Hindi, Urdu) \| Bengali (Dialects: Chittagonian, Sylheti) \| Angika \| Assamese \| Bhojpuri \| Bishnupriya Manipuri \| Dhivehi \| Dogri \| Gujarati \| Konkani \| Mahl \| Maithili \| Marathi \| Mitanni \| Nepali \| Oriya \| Punjabi \| Romani \| Sindhi \| Sinhala
Iranian	Avestan \| Persian: Old Persian - Middle Persian (Pahlavi) - Modern Persian (Varieties: Farsi, Dari, Tajik) Bukhori \| Bactrian \| Balochi \| Dari (Zoroastrianism) \| Gilaki \| Kurdish \| Mazandarani \| Ossetic \| Pamir \| Pashto \| Saka \| Sarikoli \| Scythian \| Shughni \| Sogdian \| Talysh \| Tat \| Wakhi \| Yaghnobi \| Zazaki \|
Dardic	Dameli \| Domaaki \| Gawar-Bati \| Kalasha-mun \| Kashmiri \| Khowar \| Kohistani \| Nangalami \| Pashayi \| Palula \| Shina \| Shumashti
Nuristani	Askunu \| Kalasha-ala \| Kamkata-viri \| Tregami \| Vasi-vari