About Pakhtuns: Language

The Pashto Language
From the website of Afghan-Network

Pushto/Pakhtu is one of the national languages of Afghanistan (Dari Persian is the other). Major Pushto/Pakhtu speaking cities in Afghanistan are Kandahar (Qandahar), Kabul. There are over 9 million speakers of Pushto/Pakhtu in Afghanistan. Areas where Pakhtu is spoken is commonly known as Pakhtunistan or Pashtunistan.

Linguistic Affiliation
Its Relations to Other Languages

Pushto/Pakhtu is one of the East Iranian group of languages, which includes, for example, Ossete (North Ossetian, south Ossetian, Caucasus Soviet Socialist Republic) and Yaghnobi (Tajikistan). East Iranian and West Iranian (which includes Persian) are major sub-groups of the Iranian group of the Indo Iranian branch of the Indo European family of languages. Indo-Iranian languages are spoken in a wide area stretching from portions of eastern Turkey and eastern Iraq to western India. The other main division of Indo- Iranian, in addition to Iranian, is the Indo-Aryan languages, a group comprised of many languages of the Indian subcontinent.

Language Variations
There are two major dialects of Pashto: Western Pashto spoken in Afghanistan and in the capital, Kabul, and Eastern Pashto spoken in northeastern Pakistan. Most speakers of Pashto speak these two dialects. Two other dialects are also distinguished: Southern Pashto, spoken in Baluchistan (western Pakistan and eastern Iran) and in Kandahar, Afghanistan.

The variation in spelling of the language's name (Pashto, Pukhtu, Pakhtu etc.) stems from the different pronunciations in the various dialects of the second consonant in the word; for example, it is a retroflex [sh] in the Kandahari dialect, and a palatal fricative in the Kabuli dialect. The major dialect divisions themselves have numerous variants. In general, however, one speaker of Pashto readily understands another. The Central and Southern dialects are more divergent. The Kandahari dialect is reflected in the spelling system, and is considered by some to be the "standard" for that reason.

Orthography
Pushto/Pakhtu has been written in a variant of the Persian script (which in turn is a variant of Arabic script) since the late sixteenth century. Certain letters were modified to account for sounds specific to Pushto/Pakhtu. Until the spelling system was standardized in the late eighteenth century, the representation of these consonants varied greatly. The Pushto/Pakhtu alphabet, which has more vowel sounds than either Persian or Arabic, represents the vowels more extensively than either the Persian or the Arabic alphabets.

With the adoption of Pushto/Pakhtu as a national language of Afghanistan, some revisions of the spelling system have been made in the interest of clarity.

Linguistic Sketch
Pushto/Pakhtu has a seven vowel system. There are retroflex consonants sounds pronounced with the tongue tip curled back--which were presumably borrowed from nearby Indo-Aryan languages. Unlike other Iranian languages, such as Persian, Pushto/Pakhtu allows consonant clusters of two or three sounds at the beginning of a syllable.

Pushto/Pakhtu distinguishes two grammatical genders as well as singular and plural. There are generally two nominal cases in Pushto /Pakhtu, although the vocative case is still used with singular nouns. Case is marked both with suffixes and with changes in the vowel of the noun stem and stress. Verbs agree with their subjects in person, number, and grammatical gender as well as being marked for tense/aspect. Past tense transitive sentences are formed as ergative: in these, the object rather than the subject agrees with the verb, and weak pronoun objects rather than subjects are omitted if they are not emphatic.

Word order, which is very rigid, is subject-object-verb. As the language of an Islamic people, Pushto/Pakhtu also contains a high number of borrowings from Arabic; among educated speakers, the Arabic plurals of borrowed nouns are frequently maintained.

Role in Society
In Afghanistan, Pushto/Pakhtu is second in prestige to Dari, the Persian dialect spoken natively in the north and west. Because of the political power of the Pakhtuns, however, Pushto/Pakhtu has been a required subject in Dari medium schools, and as an official language has been one of the languages of the government. For practical purposes, however, Dari is the language of business and higher education, and so Pakhtuns learn Dari.

Pushto/Pakhtu has an extensive written tradition. There are a number of classic Pakhtun poets, most notably Khushal Khan Khattak. Modern Pakhtun written literature has adapted those modern western literary forms, like the short story, that match forms from traditional Pushto/Pakhtu oral literature. Pakhtun folk literature is the most extensively developed in the region. Besides stories set to music, Pakhtun has thousands of two and four line folk poems, traditionally composed by women. These reflect the day to day life and views of Pakhtun women.

History
The first written records of Pushto/Pakhtu are believed to date from the sixteenth century and consist of an account of Shekh Mali's conquest of Swat. In the seventeenth century, Khushhal Khan Khattak, considered the national poet of Afghanistan, was writing in Pushto/Pakhtu. In this century, there has been a rapid expansion of writing in journalism and other modern genres which has forced innovation of the language and the creation of many new words.

Traces of the history of Pushto/Pakhtu are present in its vocabulary. While the majority of words can be traced to Pushto/Pakhtu's roots as member of the Eastern Iranian language branch, it has also borrowed words from adjacent languages for over two thousand years. The oldest borrowed words are from Greek, and date from the Greek occupation of Bactria in third century BC. There are also a few traces of contact with Zoroastrians and Buddhists. Starting in the Islamic period, Pushto/Pakhtu borrowed many words from Arabic and Persian. Due to its close geographic proximity to languages of the Indian sub-continent, Pushto/Pakhtu has borrowed words from Indian languages for centuries.

Pushto/Pakhtu has long been recognized as an important language in Afghanistan. Classical Pushto/Pakhtu was the object of study by British soldiers and administrators in the nineteenth century and the classical grammar in use today dates from that period.

In 1936, Pushto/Pakhtu was made the national language of Afghanistan by royal decree. Today, Dari Persian and Pushto/Pakhtu both are official national languages.

Academic Resources
Pushto/Pakhtu is taught at very few universities in the United States and Canada. The most consistent program offered is at the Diplomatic Language Services in Arlington, Virginia.