The name ‘Pashto’ is believed to come from ‘parsawā’ Persian language, a reconstructed form of proto-Iranian. The language is estimated to have around 45 – 55 million speakers. It is the language of the Pashtun people and has similarities with the Indo-Aryan language family due to the amount of borrowed words.
Pashto is an Indo-European language that belongs to the Southeastern Indo-Iranian branch of the language family and has three main varieties. Its Southern variety is an official language in Afghanistan along with Dari, while its Northern and Central varieties are used in Pakistan. However, it is also spoken in Iran, India, and Tajikistan as well as in the UAE, Saudia Arabia, and other nearby countries. Pashto is recognized by the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) as a minority language in Pakistan.
The language is written with a modified version of the Arabic script but has two standard written forms, one based on the Kandahar dialect and one in the Peshawar dialect. We can trace the writing system back to the 16th century, where it is used in an account of Shekh Mali’s conquest of Swat. However, the earliest form of literature is poetry, as seen in Mohammad Hotak’s Pata Khazana (1728–29; “The Hidden Treasure”) a collection of Pashto poetry from the 8th century onward. Pashto has an extensive literary tradition. Pashtun folk literature includes stories set to music, and a large number of short poems, traditionally composed by women, reflecting their daily lives. However, the language can be traced back to ancient times, where it had been exposed to other ancient languages such as ancient Greek, Saka, Parthian, and Persian. There is also evidence that the language has developed retroflex from various northwestern Indian languages.
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.
(Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights)
When it comes to grammar, sentence structure for Pashto is similar to Hindi. The Pashto noun comes after the adjective and the possessor precedes the possessed in the genitive construction. Pashto verb forms are the same as Hindi: the verb agrees with the subject if it is intransitive and with the object if it is transitive. Pashto has one of the most complicated morphological systems among Iranian languages. It has retained many aspects of the complex morphology of Old Iranian; both nouns and adjectives are marked based on gender, number, and case, and are divided into different noun classes (declensions). Animacy also plays a role in noun endings in plural form. Beside the vocative, Pashto nouns have two main cases: direct and oblique. Some analyses also acknowledge the existence of a second type of oblique case or an ablative case. Pashto morphosyntax is further complicated by the fact that Pashto, like many other Iranian languages, retains the split ergativity arrangement, with logical subjects getting the oblique case and logical objects getting the direct case in past transitive verbs. Pashto also has gendered nouns with rules of masculine nouns end in one letter and feminine nouns end in another. However like many languages, there are exceptions to these rules.
Most forms of Pashto are not considered endangered due to their official status in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Get a taste for the language here:
Read more about the language here:
“Pashto (پښتو).” Pashto Language and Alphabet, 24 Mar. 2024, www.omniglot.com/writing/pashto.htm.
“Pashto Language.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, inc., 20 Mar. 2025, www.britannica.com/topic/Pashto-language.
“Pashto.” Iranian Languages, iranian-languages.arizona.edu/node/4. Accessed 26 Apr. 2025.