- Official language in
- Afghanistan
- Also spoken in
- Pakistan
- Script
- Arabic
Where it's spoken
Afghanistan's constitution names Pashto and Dari as the official languages of the state, and allows one of the other languages it lists to be added as a third official language in the areas where most people speak it. Pashto is also spoken in Pakistan: a Gulf Times news report on the results of Pakistan's sixth population and housing census mentions Pashto-speaking people in Pakistan.
Sources
Script & pronunciation
The Arabic script is written from right to left, and the Unicode Standard lists Pashto among the languages for which that script has been extended. The letter Farsi yeh is among the letters used in Pashto. This app's card السلام علیکم (As-salām alaykum, "Hello (Islamic greeting: "Peace be upon you")") shows this letter in its second word, and the card's own grammar note says that this letter writes the sound /ay/ there.
Sources
- The Unicode Standard, Version 16.0.0 — Core Specification, Chapter 9: Arabic — Sections 9.2.1 and 9.2.4
Grammar essentials
A study of the standard Pashto of Afghanistan reports that, by its agreement and case systems, Pashto is known as a nominative-accusative language in the non-past tense and is called ergative-absolutive in the past tense, and concludes that it is neither completely nominative-accusative nor unanimously ergative-absolutive. A paper on nominals in Pashto adds that, in the past tenses, the oblique case appears on the subjects of transitive verbs.
Pashto word order is described as "a more flexible SOV-based word order" in the abstract of a paper on subject and object in Pashto verb structure, and the Universal Dependencies documentation for Pashto says that the subject usually comes before the object.
According to the same paper on nominals, every Pashto noun is either masculine or feminine, and adjectives and verbs inflect to agree with the gender of the noun. In this app's card ستاسو نوم څه دی؟ (Stāso num tsə day?, "What is your name?"), the card's grammar note says that the noun نوم is masculine, so the verb is دی. In this app's card د سپرېدو دروازه چېرې ده؟ (Da spredo darwāza chere da?, "Where is the boarding gate?"), the card's grammar note says that دروازه is feminine, so the copula is ده.
Sources
- Dabir-moghaddam, Mohammad; Mayar, E. R. (2023). "Agreement and Case Systems and their roles in Determining the Pashto Language Type (Standard Dialect of Afghanistan)." Language Studies 14(2), 53-76 — Abstract
- Adib, Sayed Shahabuddin; Hood, Haji Mohammad. "A Comparative Analysis of the Roles of Subject and Object in Verb Structure in English and Pashto." Balkh International Journal of Social Science 1(2), 1-23 — Abstract
- Universal Dependencies contributors. "UD for Pashto" (Universal Dependencies documentation)
- Baldoria, Yukki; Mitsuhashi, Keitaro; Tsujita, Rin (2021). "Nominals in Pashto Language." ICU Working Papers in Linguistics 17 — Sections 2, 2.2 and 4.2