It’s largely the language of government and of higher education. About 80% of the country’s communications, from print and electronic media to official government directives and records, are in Fārsī-ye Darī. Traditionally, they have also held much of the country’s political power.ĭespite all of this, Fārsī-ye Darī holds linguistic sway in Afghanistan. (It’s unclear whether these numbers represent just native speakers, or some speakers who use Pashto as an auxiliary language.)Įthnic Pashtuns make up the single largest Afghan ethnic group, accounting for about 42% of the Afghan population. Some sources say the number is as low as 18% of the population others claim that it’s as high as 48%. Varying numbers of Pashto speakers in Afghanistan are reported.
Afghan Pashto, which shares some vocabulary with Persian, is a literary language with a rich written tradition of poetry. The country’s other official language is Dari (Eastern Persian) - which many of its speakers still prefer to call Farsi, or Fārsī-ye Darī. Pashto is a regional language in Afghanistan, and one of the country’s two official languages. The disparity between the number of Pashtuns in Afghanistan and the attitudes toward their language is a delicate subject. The Pashtun diaspora has brought between 40 to 60 million Pashto speakers to the shores of many countries all over the world - such as India, the United States, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, Iran, Germany, Japan, Australia, and Russia. Some sources put the total number of native Pashto speakers in modern-day Afghanistan and Pakistan as high 18.5 million. There’s also a set of Central Pashto dialects, Bannuchi, Waziri, and Dzadrani, which are spoken along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Northern and Southern Pashto are the two primary standards. Northern Pashto counts about 9.6 million speakers in Pakistan. These dialects are sometimes called the “hard” dialects, since they use the /gh/ and /kh/ sounds in place of the older /zh/ and /sh/ sounds. The language’s “soft” dialects, which retain the age-old /zh/ and /sh/ sounds, are known collectively as Southern Pashto-and spoken by about six million people in Afghanistan.Ĭonversely, the Northern dialects are sometimes called either Paxto or Pakhto. The Pashto language is divided into three standards, or dialect groups. In Persian literature, it’s sometimes called “Afghani.” You might hear the Pashto language referred to as Pukhto, Pakhto, Pashtu, and Pushto. There are smaller groups of Pashto speakers in Tajikistan, as well as Iran. Pashto is native to both Pakistan and Afghanistan. It’s closely related to Farsi, Kurdish, and Balochi, among other languages.
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