Pashto
Language · official in 1 country
Pashto, پښتو in its own script, is an Eastern Iranian language that older Persian literature called Afghani. Its native speakers are the Pashtuns of southern and eastern Afghanistan and northwestern Pakistan. A royal decree of 1936 first made it an official language of Afghanistan, where it now shares national status with Dari.
The language on record
- Own name
- پښتو
- ISO 639-1
- PS
- ISO 639-3
- PUS
- Script
- Arabic
- Family
- Eastern Iranian
- Official in
- 1 country
Where Pashto is official
Afghanistan alone. In Pakistan, where many Pashtuns live, Pashto has no federal status and is the regional language of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and northern Balochistan.
Official beside Pashto
About Pashto
How Pashto became a language of the Afghan state
Afghanistan's monarchs were Pashtuns from the early 18th century, but Persian was the language of the royal court and of most government offices. The tribes spoke Pashto. The Afghan crown began promoting Pashto in the 1920s as a mark of national identity after the Third Anglo-Afghan War of 1919. A Pashto Society was set up in 1931, Kabul University opened in 1932 and the Pashto Academy, Pashto Tolana, followed in 1937.
The 1936 decree gave Pashto full rights in government and education, even though the royal family and most officials spoke Persian. The constitutional assembly confirmed its status in 1964, the year Afghan Persian was renamed Dari. The government in power since 2021 has kept both languages official; critics accuse it of pushing Persian aside, and the national anthem it uses is in Pashto.
Why no single standard Pashto exists
The dialects split into a soft southern group, Paṣ̌tō, and a hard northern group, Pax̌tō or Pakhtu. Literary Pashto is an artificial register said to rest on the northwestern dialect of the central Ghilji region. David MacKenzie argued that the dialects differ mostly in sound, and that an alphabet which hides those differences has kept the written language widely understood for at least four centuries.
Who shaped the Pashto alphabet
Pashto uses a modified Perso-Arabic script. In the 16th century Bayazid Pir Roshan added 13 letters to it, and the alphabet now has 45 or 46 letters and 4 diacritics. Latin letters are used too. In that transcription, accents over the vowels mark stress.
What the Hidden Treasure manuscript claimed
In 1944 the scholar Abdul Hai Habibi published Pə́ṭa Xazāná, an anthology he said came from the 18th century and held verses by Pashto poets back to the 8th. It would have made Pashto literature older than Persian. Linguistic analysis later discredited the text. David MacKenzie and Lucia Serena Loi are among those who dispute it. In Afghanistan the publication still made Habibi's name as a promoter of Pashto culture.
Common questions
Questions about Pashto
What is the difference between Pashto and Pakhto?
The two spellings follow the two dialect groups. The soft southern dialects say Paṣ̌tō; the hard northern dialects, among them Yusapzai and Momand, say Pax̌tō.
Does Pakistan recognise Pashto officially?
Not at the federal level, where Urdu and English are official. Pashto is the regional language of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and northern Balochistan, and in the 2023 census it was the first language of 18.1% of Pakistan's population.
Why was Pashto called Afghani?
Historical Persian literature used Afghani for the language of the Afghans, a name used for the Pashtuns from the 3rd century CE onward.