Pashto

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Pashto, or Pakhto, is a language that has its origins in the northeastern group of the Iranian languages; it is considered the language of the Pashtun people. It is believed that at least 10 million people speak Pashto. Not only is it one of the official languages spoken in Afghanistan (Dari is the other official language), but other communities, such as the people in the North West Frontier and Baluchistan provinces of Pakistan, speak it as well.

Several Pashto dialects exist, the main ones being the western or southwestern and the eastern or northeastern. The former is often referenced as Pashto, while the latter is called Pakhto. One of the differences between the two dialects is that the speakers use different symbols or letters to represent the same sound. To compensate for these differences and thus create a sense of unity among the speakers of Pashto, completely separate letters were devised to replace those that caused the confusion. Current deviations of written Pashto occur between the Pashto written in Afghanistan and that in Pakistan. Pakistani people are rarely taught Pashto in school, so that the Pakistani Pashto-speaking population tends to spell phonetically.

Some historical accounts state that Pashto first appeared in written form in a work by Bayazid Ansari (c. 1525–c. 1581), an Afghan religious leader who declared that he had received divine instruction to write his work in Pashto. Ansari's work is believed to be the earliest existing written piece in Pashto.

Adamec, Ludwig W. (1997) Historical Dictionary of Afghanistan. 2d ed. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press.

Cleveland, William L. (1994) A History of the Modern Middle East. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

Norton, Augustus Richard, ed. (1996) Civil Society in the Middle East. Leiden, Netherlands, and New York: Brill.

Rubin, Barnett R. (1995) The Fragmentation of Afghanistan: State Formation and Collapse in the International System. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.