The History of
Pashto language
Pushto is one of the national languages of Afghanistan (Dari Persian is the
other). Major Pushto speaking cities in Afghanistan are Kandahar (Qandahar),
Kabul. There are over 9 million speakers of Pushto in Afghanistan.
LINGUISTIC AFFILIATION (its relations to other
languages)
Pushto is one of the East Iranian group of languages,
which includes, for example, Ossete (North Ossetian, south Ossetian, Caucasus
Soviet Socialist Republic) and Yaghnobi (Tajikistan).
East Iranian and
West Iranian (which includes Persian) are major sub-groups of the Iranian group
of the Indo Iranian branch of the Indo European family of languages.
Indo-Iranian languages are spoken in a wide area stretching from portions of
eastern Turkey and eastern Iraq to western India. The other main division of
Indo- Iranian, in addition to Iranian, is the Indo-Aryan languages, a group
comprised of many languages of the Indian subcontinent..
LANGUAGE
VARIATION
There are two major dialects of Pashto: Western Pashto
spoken in Afghanistan and in the capital, Kabul, and Eastern
Pashto spoken in northeastern Pakistan. Most speakers of Pashto speak these two
dialects. Two other dialects are also distinguished: Southern Pashto, spoken in
Baluchistan (western Pakistan and eastern Iran) and in Kandahar,
Afghanistan.
The variation in spelling of the language's name (Pashto,
Pukhto, etc.) stems from the different pronunciations in the various dialects of
the second consonant in the word; for example, it is a retroflex [sh] in the
Kandahari dialect, and a palatal fricative in the Kabuli dialect. The major
dialect divisions themselves have numerous variants. In general, however, one
speaker of Pashto readily understands another. The Central and Southern dialects
are more divergent. The Kandahari dialect is reflected in the spelling system,
and is considered by some to be the "standard" for that
reason.
ORTHOGRAPHY
Pushto has been written in a variant of
the Persian script (which in turn is a variant of Arabic script) since the late
sixteenth century. Certain letters were modified to account for sounds specific
to Pushto. Until the spelling system was standardized in the late eighteenth
century, the representation of these consonants varied greatly. The Pushto
alphabet, which has more vowel sounds than either Persian or Arabic, represents
the vowels more extensively than either the Persian or the Arabic
alphabets.
With the adoption of Pushto as a national language of Afghanistan,
some revisions of the spelling system have been made in the interest of
clarity.
LINGUISTIC SKETCH
Pushto has a seven vowel system.
There are retroflex consonants sounds pronounced with the tongue tip curled
back--which were presumably borrowed from nearby Indo-Aryan languages. Unlike
other Iranian languages, such as Persian, Pushto allows consonant clusters of
two or three sounds at the beginning of a syllable.
Pushto distinguishes
two grammatical genders as well as singular and plural. There are generally two
nominal cases in Pushto, although the vocative case is still used with singular
nouns. Case is marked both with suffixes and with changes in the vowel of the
noun stem and stress. Verbs agree with their subjects in person, number, and
grammatical gender as well as being marked for tense/aspect. Past tense
transitive sentences are formed as ergative: in these, the object rather than
the subject agrees with the verb, and weak pronoun objects rather than subjects
are omitted if they are not emphatic.
Word order, which is very rigid, is
subject-object-verb. As the language of an Islamic people, Pushto also contains
a high number of borrowings from Arabic; among educated speakers, the Arabic
plurals of borrowed nouns are frequently maintained.
ROLE IN
SOCIETY
In Afghanistan, Pushto is second in prestige to Dari, the
Persian dialect spoken natively in the north and west. Because of the political
power of the Pushtuns, however, Pushto has been a required subject in Dari
medium schools, and as an official language has been one of the languages of the
government. For practical purposes, however, Dari is the language of business
and higher education, and so Pushtuns learn Dari.
Pushto has an extensive written tradition. There are a number of classic
Pushtun poets, most notably Khosal Khan Khattak. Modern Pushtun written
literature has adapted those modern western literary forms, like the short
story, that match forms from traditional Pushto oral literature. Pushtun folk
literature is the most extensively developed in the region. Besides stories set
to music, Pushtun has thousands of two and four line folk poems, traditionally
composed by women. These reflect the day to day life and views of Pushtun
women.
HISTORY
The first written records of Pushto are
believed to date from the sixteenth century and consist of an account of Shekh
Mali's conquest of Swat. In the seventeenth century, Khushhal Khan
Khattak, considered the national poet of Afghanistan, was writing in Pushto.
In this century, there has been a rapid expansion of writing in journalism and
other modern genres which has forced innovation of the language and the creation
of many new words.
Traces of the history of Pushto are present in its
vocabulary. While the majority of words can be traced to Pushto's roots as
member of the Eastern Iranian language branch, it has also borrowed words from
adjacent languages for over two thousand years. The oldest borrowed words are
from Greek, and date from the Greek occupation of Bactria in third century BC.
There are also a few traces of contact with Zoroastrians and Buddhists. Starting
in the Islamic period, Pushto borrowed many words from Arabic and Persian. Due
to its close geographic proximity to languages of the Indian sub-continent,
Pushto has borrowed words from Indian languages for centuries.
Pushto has
long been recognized as an important language in Afghanistan. Classical Pushto
was the object of study by British soldiers and administrators in the nineteenth
century and the classical grammar in use today dates from that period.
In
1936, Pushto was made the national language of Afghanistan by royal decree.
Today, Dari Persian and Pushto both are official national
languages.
ACADEMIC RESOURCES
Pushto is taught at very few
universities in the United States and Canada. The most consistent program
offered is at the Diplomatic Language Services in Arlington, Virginia.
See our
references for more information and sources
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