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54-766: The largest living Eastern Iranian language is Pashto , with at least 80 million speakers between the Oxus River in Afghanistan and the Indus River in Pakistan . The second-largest living Eastern Iranian language is Ossetic , with roughly 600,000 speakers across Ossetia (split between Georgia and Russia ). All other languages of the Eastern Iranian subgroup have fewer than 200,000 speakers combined. Most living Eastern Iranian languages are spoken in

108-794: A in Southern Pashto, but changes to gu x t in Shughni, γwa x̌ a in Central and Northern Pashto. Pashto Pashto ( / ˈ p ʌ ʃ t oʊ / PUH -shto , / ˈ p æ ʃ t oʊ / PASH -toe ; پښتو , Pəx̌tó , [pəʂˈto, pʊxˈto, pəʃˈto, pəçˈto] ) is an Eastern Iranian language in the Indo-European language family , natively spoken in northwestern Pakistan and southern and eastern Afghanistan . It has official status in Afghanistan and

162-453: A royal decree of Zahir Shah formally granted Pashto the status of an official language, with full rights to use in all aspects of government and education – despite the fact that the ethnically Pashtun royal family and bureaucrats mostly spoke Persian. Thus Pashto became a national language , a symbol for Pashtun nationalism . The constitutional assembly reaffirmed the status of Pashto as an official language in 1964 when Afghan Persian

216-628: A contiguous area: southern and eastern Afghanistan and the adjacent parts of western Pakistan; the Badakhshan Mountainous Autonomous Region in eastern Tajikistan ; and the westernmost parts of Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in western China . There are also two living members in widely separated areas: the Yaghnobi language of northwestern Tajikistan (descended from Sogdian ); and the Ossetic language of

270-524: A device). Post-7th century borrowings came primarily from Persian and Hindi-Urdu , with Arabic words being borrowed through Persian, but sometimes directly. Modern speech borrows words from English, French , and German . However, a remarkably large number of words are unique to Pashto. Here is an exemplary list of Pure Pashto and borrowings: naṛә́i jahān dunyā tod/táwda garm aṛtyā́ ḍarurah híla umid də...pə aṛá bāra bolә́la qasidah Spirant A fricative

324-613: A nasal vowel, and in Igbo nasality is a feature of the syllable; when /f v s z ʃ ʒ/ occur in nasal syllables they are themselves nasalized. Until its extinction, Ubykh may have been the language with the most fricatives (29 not including /h/ ), some of which did not have dedicated symbols or diacritics in the IPA . This number actually outstrips the number of all consonants in English (which has 24 consonants). By contrast, approximately 8.7% of

378-696: A pervasive external influence on the closest neighbouring Eastern Iranian, as it is evident in the development in the retroflex consonants (in Pashto, Wakhi, Sanglechi, Khotanese, etc.) and aspirates (in Khotanese, Parachi and Ormuri). A more localized sound change is the backing of the former retroflex fricative ṣ̌ [ʂ] , to x̌ [x] or to x [χ] , found in the Shughni–Yazgulyam branch and certain dialects of Pashto. E.g. "meat": ɡu ṣ̌ t in Wakhi and γwa ṣ̌

432-612: A promoter of the wealth and antiquity of Afghanistan's Pashto culture." From the 16th century, Pashto poetry become very popular among the Pashtuns. Some of those who wrote in Pashto are Bayazid Pir Roshan (a major inventor of the Pashto alphabet ), Khushal Khan Khattak , Rahman Baba , Nazo Tokhi , and Ahmad Shah Durrani , founder of the modern state of Afghanistan or the Durrani Empire . The Pashtun literary tradition grew in

486-723: A tense, unaspirated /s͈/ in Korean ; aspirated fricatives are also found in a few Sino-Tibetan languages , in some Oto-Manguean languages , in the Siouan language Ofo ( /sʰ/ and /fʰ/ ), and in the (central?) Chumash languages ( /sʰ/ and /ʃʰ/ ). The record may be Cone Tibetan , which has four contrastive aspirated fricatives: /sʰ/ /ɕʰ/ , /ʂʰ/ , and /xʰ/ . Phonemically nasalized fricatives are rare. Umbundu has /ṽ/ and Kwangali and Souletin Basque have /h̃/ . In Coatzospan Mixtec , [β̃, ð̃, s̃, ʃ̃] appear allophonically before

540-522: A variety very similar to it, while others have attempted to place it closer to Bactrian . However, neither position is universally agreed upon. What scholars do agree on is the fact that Pashto is an Eastern Iranian language sharing characteristics with Eastern Middle Iranian languages such as Bactrian, Khwarezmian and Sogdian . Compare with other Eastern Iranian Languages and Old Avestan : Zə tā winə́m /ɐz dɐ wənən/ Az bū tū dzunim Strabo , who lived between 64 BC and 24 CE, explains that

594-404: Is a consonant produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together. These may be the lower lip against the upper teeth, in the case of [f] ; the back of the tongue against the soft palate in the case of German [x] (the final consonant of Bach ); or the side of the tongue against the molars , in the case of Welsh [ɬ] (appearing twice in

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648-525: Is an older term for fricatives used by some American and European phoneticians and phonologists for non-sibilant fricatives. " Strident " could mean just "sibilant", but some authors include also labiodental and uvular fricatives in the class. The airflow is not completely stopped in the production of fricative consonants. In other words, the airflow experiences friction . All sibilants are coronal , but may be dental , alveolar , postalveolar , or palatal ( retroflex ) within that range. However, at

702-509: Is scattered throughout the world, but is confined to nonsibilant fricatives with the exception of a couple of languages that have [ʒ] but lack [ʃ] . (Relatedly, several languages have the voiced affricate [ dʒ ] but lack [tʃ] , and vice versa.) The fricatives that occur most often without a voiceless counterpart are – in order of ratio of unpaired occurrences to total occurrences – [ʝ] , [β] , [ð] , [ʁ] and [ɣ] . Fricatives appear in waveforms as somewhat random noise caused by

756-463: Is sometimes classified as Eastern Iranian, but is not assigned to a branch in 21st-century classifications. The Eastern Iranian area has been affected by widespread sound changes , e.g. t͡ʃ > ts. Common to most Eastern Iranian languages is a particularly widespread lenition of the voiced stops *b, *d, *g. Between vowels, these have been lenited also in most Western Iranian languages, but in Eastern Iranian, spirantization also generally occurs in

810-564: Is taught poorly in schools in Pakistan. Moreover, in government schools material is not provided for in the Pashto dialect of that locality, Pashto being a dialectically rich language. Further, researchers have observed that Pashtun students are unable to fully comprehend educational material in Urdu. Professor Tariq Rahman states: "The government of Pakistan, faced with irredentist claims from Afghanistan on its territory, also discouraged

864-466: Is the primary language of the Pashtun diaspora around the world. The total number of Pashto-speakers is at least 40 million, although some estimates place it as high as 60 million. Pashto is "one of the primary markers of ethnic identity" amongst Pashtuns. A national language of Afghanistan , Pashto is primarily spoken in the east, south, and southwest, but also in some northern and western parts of

918-590: The Caucasus (descended from Scytho-Sarmatian and is hence classified as Eastern Iranian despite its location). These are remnants of a vast ethno-linguistic continuum that stretched over most of Central Asia , parts of the Caucasus, Eastern Europe , and Western Asia in the 1st millennium BC — an area otherwise known as Scythia . The large Eastern Iranian continuum in Eastern Europe would continue up to

972-582: The Pashtun tribes spoke Pashto as their native tongue . King Amanullah Khan began promoting Pashto during his reign (1926–1929) as a marker of ethnic identity and as 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

1026-641: The Punjab province , areas of Gilgit-Baltistan and in Islamabad . Pashto speakers are found in other major cities of Pakistan, most notably Karachi , Sindh, which may have the largest Pashtun population of any city in the world. Other communities of Pashto speakers are found in India , Tajikistan , and northeastern Iran (primarily in South Khorasan Province to the east of Qaen , near

1080-574: The ll of Welsh , as in Lloyd , Llewelyn , and Machynlleth ( [maˈxənɬɛθ] , a town), as the unvoiced 'hl' and voiced 'dl' or 'dhl' in the several languages of Southern Africa (such as Xhosa and Zulu ), and in Mongolian. No language distinguishes fricatives from approximants at these places, so the same symbol is used for both. For the pharyngeal, approximants are more numerous than fricatives. A fricative realization may be specified by adding

1134-422: The uptack to the letters, [χ̝, ʁ̝, ħ̝, ʕ̝] . Likewise, the downtack may be added to specify an approximant realization, [χ̞, ʁ̞, ħ̞, ʕ̞] . (The bilabial approximant and dental approximant do not have dedicated symbols either and are transcribed in a similar fashion: [β̞, ð̞] . However, the base letters are understood to specifically refer to the fricatives.) In many languages, such as English or Korean,

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1188-667: The voiced labiodental fricative /v/ . The dental member has proved the most unstable: while a voiced dental fricative /ð/ is preserved in some Pamir languages, it has in e.g. Pashto and Munji lenited further to /l/ . On the other hand, in Yaghnobi and Ossetian, the development appears to have been reversed, leading to the reappearance of a voiced stop /d/ . (Both languages have also shifted earlier *θ > /t/ .) The consonant clusters *ft and *xt have also been widely lenited, though again excluding Ormuri-Parachi, and possibly Yaghnobi. The neighboring Indo-Aryan languages have exerted

1242-761: The 4th century AD, with the successors of the Scythians, namely the Sarmatians . Western Iranian is thought to have separated from Proto-Iranian in the course of the later 2nd millennium BC not long after Avestan , possibly occurring in the Yaz culture . Eastern Iranian followed suit, and developed in place of Proto-Iranian, spoken within the Andronovo horizon . Due to the Greek presence in Central Asia, some of

1296-825: The 8th century, and they use the writings found in Pata Khazana . Pə́ṭa Xazāná ( پټه خزانه ) is a Pashto manuscript claimed to be written by Mohammad Hotak under the patronage of the Pashtun emperor Hussain Hotak in Kandahar ; containing an anthology of Pashto poets. However, its authenticity is disputed by scholars such as David Neil MacKenzie and Lucia Serena Loi. Nile Green comments in this regard: "In 1944, Habibi claimed to have discovered an eighteenth-century manuscript anthology containing much older biographies and verses of Pashto poets that stretched back as far as

1350-711: The Afghan border). In India most ethnic Pashtun (Pathan) peoples speak the geographically native Hindi-Urdu language rather than Pashto, but there are small numbers of Pashto speakers, such as the Sheen Khalai in Rajasthan , and the Pathan community in the city of Kolkata , often nicknamed the Kabuliwala ("people of Kabul "). Pashtun diaspora communities in other countries around the world speak Pashto, especially

1404-716: The Americas. Overall, voicing contrasts in fricatives are much rarer than in plosives, being found only in about a third of the world's languages as compared to 60 percent for plosive voicing contrasts. About 15 percent of the world's languages, however, have unpaired voiced fricatives , i.e. a voiced fricative without a voiceless counterpart. Two-thirds of these, or 10 percent of all languages, have unpaired voiced fricatives but no voicing contrast between any fricative pair. This phenomenon occurs because voiced fricatives have developed from lenition of plosives or fortition of approximants. This phenomenon of unpaired voiced fricatives

1458-810: The Arab conquests and during Islamic-Arab rule. The replacement of the Pahlavi script with the Arabic script in order to write the Persian language was done by the Tahirids in 9th century Khorasan. The Persian Dari language spread, leading to the extinction of Eastern Iranic languages including Bactrian and Khorezmian . Only a few speakers of the Sogdian descended Yaghnobi remain among the largely Persian-speaking Tajik population of Central Asia. This appears to be due to

1512-558: The Pakistani province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa . It is known in historical Persian literature as Afghani ( افغانی , Afghāni ). Spoken as a native language mostly by ethnic Pashtuns , it is one of the two official languages of Afghanistan alongside Dari , and it is the second-largest provincial language of Pakistan , spoken mainly in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and the northern districts of Balochistan . Likewise, it

1566-529: The Pashto Movement and eventually allowed its use in peripheral domains only after the Pakhtun elite had been co-opted by the ruling elite...Thus, even though there is still an active desire among some Pakhtun activists to use Pashto in the domains of power, it is more of a symbol of Pakhtun identity than one of nationalism." Robert Nicols states: "In the end, national language policy, especially in

1620-680: The Society's annual meeting in 1927. In 1955, Pashtun intellectuals including Abdul Qadir formed the Pashto Academy Peshawar on the model of Pashto Tolana formed in Afghanistan. In 1974, the Department of Pashto was established in the University of Balochistan for the promotion of Pashto. In Pakistan, Pashto is the first language around of 15% of its population (per the 1998 census). However, Urdu and English are

1674-511: The backdrop to weakening Pashtun power following Mughal rule: Khushal Khan Khattak used Pashto poetry to rally for Pashtun unity and Pir Bayazid as an expedient means to spread his message to the Pashtun masses. For instance Khushal Khattak laments in : "The Afghans (Pashtuns) are far superior to the Mughals at the sword, Were but the Afghans, in intellect, a little discreet. If

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1728-416: The country. The exact number of speakers is unavailable, but different estimates show that Pashto is the mother tongue of 45–60% of the total population of Afghanistan . In Pakistan , Pashto is spoken by 15% of its population, mainly in the northwestern province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and northern districts of Balochistan province. It is also spoken in parts of Mianwali and Attock districts of

1782-410: The different tribes would but support each other, Kings would have to bow down in prostration before them" Pashto is a subject–object–verb (SOV) language with split ergativity . In Pashto, this means that the verb agrees with the subject in transitive and intransitive sentences in non-past, non-completed clauses, but when a completed action is reported in any of the past tenses, the verb agrees with

1836-628: The easternmost of these languages were recorded in their Middle Iranian stage (hence the "Eastern" classification), while almost no records of the Scytho-Sarmatian continuum stretching from Kazakhstan west across the Pontic steppe to Ukraine have survived. Some authors find that the Eastern Iranian people had an influence on Russian folk culture. Middle Persian/Dari spread around the Oxus River region, Afghanistan, and Khorasan after

1890-443: The eighth century. It was an extraordinary claim, implying as it did that the history of Pashto literature reached back further in time than Persian, thus supplanting the hold of Persian over the medieval Afghan past. Although it was later convincingly discredited through formal linguistic analysis, Habibi's publication of the text under the title Pata Khazana ('Hidden Treasure') would (in Afghanistan at least) establish his reputation as

1944-562: 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. Muhammad Na'im Khan, the minister of education between 1938 and 1946, inaugurated the formal policy of promoting Pashto as Afghanistan's national language, leading to the commission and publication of Pashto textbooks. The Pashto Tolana

1998-451: The field of education in the NWFP, had constructed a type of three tiered language hierarchy. Pashto lagged far behind Urdu and English in prestige or development in almost every domain of political or economic power..." Although Pashto used as a medium of instruction in schools for Pashtun students results in better understanding and comprehension for students when compared to using Urdu, still

2052-556: The glottal "fricatives" are unaccompanied phonation states of the glottis, without any accompanying manner , fricative or otherwise. They may be mistaken for real glottal constrictions in a number of languages, such as Finnish . Fricatives are very commonly voiced, though cross-linguistically voiced fricatives are not nearly as common as tenuis ("plain") fricatives. Other phonations are common in languages that have those phonations in their stop consonants. However, phonemically aspirated fricatives are rare. /s~sʰ/ contrasts with

2106-399: The government of Pakistan has only introduced Pashto at the primary levels in state-run schools. Taimur Khan remarks: "the dominant Urdu language squeezes and denies any space for Pashto language in the official and formal capacity. In this contact zone, Pashto language exists but in a subordinate and unofficial capacity". Some linguists have argued that Pashto is descended from Avestan or

2160-659: The large numbers of Persian-speakers in Arab-Islamic armies that invaded Central Asia and later Muslim governments in the region such as the Samanids . Persian was rooted into Central Asia by the Samanids. Eastern Iranian remains in large part a dialect continuum subject to common innovation. Traditional branches, such as "Northeastern", as well as Eastern Iranian itself, are better considered language areas rather than genetic groups. The languages are as follows: Avestan

2214-431: The name Llanelli ). This turbulent airflow is called frication . A particular subset of fricatives are the sibilants . When forming a sibilant, one still is forcing air through a narrow channel, but in addition, the tongue is curled lengthwise to direct the air over the edge of the teeth. English [s] , [z] , [ʃ] , and [ʒ] are examples of sibilants. The usage of two other terms is less standardized: " Spirant "

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2268-483: The native elements of the lexicon are related to other Eastern Iranian languages . As noted by Josef Elfenbein, "Loanwords have been traced in Pashto as far back as the third century B.C., and include words from Greek and probably Old Persian". For instance, Georg Morgenstierne notes the Pashto word مېچن mečә́n i.e. a hand-mill as being derived from the Ancient Greek word μηχανή ( mēkhanḗ , i.e.

2322-643: The other languages without true fricatives do have [h] in their consonant inventory. Voicing contrasts in fricatives are largely confined to Europe, Africa, and Western Asia. Languages of South and East Asia, such as Mandarin Chinese , Korean , and the Austronesian languages , typically do not have such voiced fricatives as [z] and [v] , which are familiar to many European speakers. In some Dravidian languages they occur as allophones. These voiced fricatives are also relatively rare in indigenous languages of

2376-465: The possessed in the genitive construction, and adjectives come before the nouns they modify. Unlike most other Indo-Iranian languages, Pashto uses all three types of adpositions —prepositions, postpositions, and circumpositions. *The retroflex rhotic or lateral, tends to be a lateral flap [ 𝼈 ] at the beginning of a syllable or other prosodic unit, and a regular flap [ ɽ ] or approximant [ ɻ ] elsewhere. In Pashto, most of

2430-626: The postalveolar place of articulation, the tongue may take several shapes: domed, laminal , or apical , and each of these is given a separate symbol and a separate name. Prototypical retroflexes are subapical and palatal, but they are usually written with the same symbol as the apical postalveolars. The alveolars and dentals may also be either apical or laminal, but this difference is indicated with diacritics rather than with separate symbols. The IPA also has letters for epiglottal fricatives, with allophonic trilling, but these might be better analyzed as pharyngeal trills. The lateral fricative occurs as

2484-473: The sizable communities in the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia . Pashto is one of the two official languages of Afghanistan, along with Dari Persian . Since the early 18th century, the monarchs of Afghanistan have been ethnic Pashtuns (except for Habibullāh Kalakāni in 1929). Persian, the literary language of the royal court, was more widely used in government institutions, while

2538-444: The subject if it is intransitive, but with the object if it is transitive. Verbs are inflected for present, simple past, past progressive, present perfect, and past perfect tenses. There is also an inflection for the subjunctive mood . Nouns and adjectives are inflected for two genders (masculine and feminine), two numbers (singular and plural), and four cases (direct, oblique, ablative, and vocative). The possessor precedes

2592-491: The tribes inhabiting the lands west of the Indus River were part of Ariana . This was around the time when the area inhabited by the Pashtuns was governed by the Greco-Bactrian Kingdom . From the 3rd century CE onward, they are mostly referred to by the name Afghan ( Abgan ). Abdul Hai Habibi believed that the earliest modern Pashto work dates back to Amir Kror Suri of the early Ghurid period in

2646-451: The turbulent airflow, upon which a periodic pattern is overlaid if voiced. Fricatives produced in the front of the mouth tend to have energy concentration at higher frequencies than ones produced in the back. The centre of gravity ( CoG ), i.e. the average frequency in a spectrum weighted by the amplitude (also known as spectral mean ), may be used to determine the place of articulation of a fricative relative to that of another. Symbols to

2700-411: 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 and north Balochistan . Yet, the primary medium of education in government schools in Pakistan is Urdu. The lack of importance given to Pashto and its neglect has caused growing resentment amongst Pashtuns. It is noted that Pashto

2754-476: The word-initial position. This phenomenon is however not apparent in Avestan, and remains absent from Ormuri-Parachi. A series of spirant consonants can be assumed to have been the first stage: *b > *β, *d > *ð, *g > *ɣ. The voiced velar fricative /ɣ/ has mostly been preserved. The labial member has been well-preserved too, but in most languages has shifted from a voiced bilabial fricative /β/ to

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2808-429: The world's languages have no phonemic fricatives at all. This is a typical feature of Australian Aboriginal languages , where the few fricatives that exist result from changes to plosives or approximants , but also occurs in some indigenous languages of New Guinea and South America that have especially small numbers of consonants. However, whereas [h] is entirely unknown in indigenous Australian languages, most of

2862-587: Was later incorporated into the Academy of Sciences Afghanistan in line with Soviet model following the Saur Revolution in 1978. Although officially supporting the use of Pashto, the Afghan elite regarded Persian as a "sophisticated language and a symbol of cultured upbringing". King Zahir Shah (reigning 1933–1973) thus followed suit after his father Nadir Khan had decreed in 1933 that officials were to study and utilize both Persian and Pashto. In 1936

2916-634: Was officially renamed to Dari . The lyrics of the national anthem of Afghanistan are in Pashto. In British India , prior to the creation of Pakistan by the British government, the 1920s saw the blossoming of Pashto language in the then NWFP : Abdul Ghafar Khan in 1921 established the Anjuman-e- Islah al-Afaghina (Society for the Reformation of Afghans) to promote Pashto as an extension of Pashtun culture; around 80,000 people attended

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