Central Ghilzai Pashto: the speech of Wardak, Ghazni and Logar

At a glance

• The north-western group of Pashto dialects is the speech of the central Ghilzai and of Wardak, Ghazni, Logar and the outskirts of Kabul. Linguists have named it differently: Kieffer's Manjanay (the "middle" dialects), MacKenzie's Central Ghilzai, Tegey and Robson's Kabul or Central dialect. [3, 4, 7, 9]

• Its mark is how the letters ښ and ږ are said. Kandahar curls the tongue back (ṣ̌ and ẓ̌), Peshawar uses x and g, and this group puts the tongue against the hard palate: ç, the sound in German ich, and its voiced partner ʝ. The name of the language comes out as paçto. [4, 9]

• Descriptions do not agree on every detail. Tegey and Robson write ږ as a plain g for Kabul speech, and the sources differ on whether څ keeps its ts. [3, 4]

• Wardak speech is described in a 2014 University of North Dakota thesis as a dialect of Pashto, not a separate language. It does not share the vowel shift of the Karlani dialects, though ā moves towards å. [5, 6]

• "Central" is used for two different groups in the literature. Here it means the Ghilzai one. [4]

Two meanings of central

The word "central" has been given to two sets of dialects. For Anne Boyle David, writing in 2014, the Middle dialects (Pashto manǰanəy, منځنۍ) are a group noted mainly for their vowels, and her two examples are Waziri, spoken in Waziristan and Bannu, and Dzadrani, spoken in south-western Khost. [4] The ISO code for "Central Pashto", pst, stands against that group in her table. [4] Barrister Ibrahim Khan, in the Peshawar journal Pashto (2021), uses "Central" in the same way for Waziri and Khattak speech, which has a postalveolar sh and a vowel shift. [6]

The speech of the Ghilzai and Wardak is another thing. Kieffer used the same Pashto word, Manjanay, for a zone of dialects between Jalalabad and Kandahar defined by the palatal consonants described below. [7] MacKenzie called the north-western dialect "Central Ghilzai", and Tegey and Robson call theirs the Kabul or Central dialect. [3, 4] Khan calls it the "Western" variety of the north. [6] David's table sets Kieffer's group beside her Middle dialects, but the sounds Kieffer used to define it are not the ones David uses for hers. [4, 7]

Where the group is spoken

The Ghilzai are the people at the centre of it. M. Jamil Hanifi, writing in the Encyclopaedia Iranica, put them at about two fifths of an estimated eight million Pashtuns in Afghanistan, concentrated between the Durand Line and a line running from Kandahar through Ghazni to Kabul, and east to Jalalabad. [10] He names the Hotak, Tokhi and Kharoti as the main western tribes and the Sulaiman Khel, Ali Khel and Tarakai among the eastern. [10] The Hotaks of Kandahar are the people of Mirwais Hotak and the Hotak dynasty.

A tribe that wide does not speak one way. Georg Morgenstierne, reporting on his linguistic mission to Afghanistan, wrote that "the name Ghilzai covers a great variety, not only of tribes, but also of dialects". [1] Josef Elfenbein's table, as David reproduces it, puts three Ghilzai groups into three dialects: the southern Ghilzai with Kandahar, the north-eastern with Peshawar, and the central Ghilzai with the north-western dialect. [4]

For the north-western group itself, the sources give these places:

• A Linguistic Data Consortium report names Wardak, Ghazni, the central Ghilzai and the outskirts of Kabul, and lists east and north-east Afghanistan under the same heading. [9]

• Tegey and Robson place their Central dialect in Kabul, Logar, Ghazni and Parwan provinces. [3, 4]

• MacKenzie took the name Central Ghilzai from the tribe found around the provinces of Ghazni and Zabol. [4]

• Penzl, in a description David summarises, noted that ږ is palatal in Wardak, while in Logar څ is said s, as at Peshawar. [4]

• Morgenstierne wrote that in northern Ghilzai speech, for example in Maidan west of Kabul and in Laghman, the sound of ښ approaches x. [1]

The British linguist George Grierson drew a different line. In 1921 he took the southern limit of the great Ghilzai tribe as the border between two dialects and placed the Ghilzai with the north-eastern speakers, adding that in and around the city of Ghazni people speak Persian, while the Pashto of the neighbourhood is north-eastern. [4] On the older question of "soft" and "hard" Pashto, Olaf Caroe said the Ghilzai speak a soft dialect like the Durranis, and the anthropologist Jon Anderson, in a 1975 study of the Ghilzai, said a hard one. [4]

How ښ and ږ are said

Kieffer's table in the Encyclopaedia Iranica shows the group in three words. "Woman" and "beard" have a palatal x̌ and γ̌ in the Manjanay column, against ṣ̌ and ẓ̌ at Kandahar and x and g at Jalalabad, and "mill" has z. [7] He adds that the Manjanay area is one of many mixtures, "x̌ and γ̌, x̌ and g, or x and γ̌", but never the pair ṣ̌ and ẓ̌ of Kandahar or the pair x and g of the east. [7] He called x̌ "close to ich-laut" and γ̌ "a strongly palatalized velar spirant". [7]

Morgenstierne described the same zone as transitional. In his Iranica article the word for "woman" can begin with š, ṣ̌, x̌ or x, and "six" can end in ž, ẓ̌, γ̌ or g. [8] In his 1932 report he called the central Ghilzai dialects "a transitional group". [2] In the earlier report he noted that among the southern Ghilzai, such as the Sulaiman Khel, the ṣ̌ is made with the tongue "retroverted very far back". [1]

Later descriptions fix the values. The consortium report gives ç for ښ and ʝ for ږ for its Central group, and David's table of MacKenzie's four dialects gives the same. [4, 9] Tegey and Robson, working from Kabul speech, write ښ as [x], a "voiceless palatal (or front velar) fricative", and their eastern column as [kh], a velar. [3] For ږ they write [g] in the central column, the same as the eastern, with a retroflex sound at Kandahar. [3] David observes that Henderson's north-eastern speakers have g for ږ, with ʝ restricted to Wardak province, a feature Penzl had noticed, and concludes that both ʝ and g can be expected in speech labelled north-western. [4]

The notation differs too. The same palatal sound is x̌ in Kieffer, ç in David and the consortium, and [x] in Tegey and Robson. Morgenstierne's Iranica article uses x̌ and ǧ simply to transliterate the two letters. [8]

Three words from David's table show the result, with the north-western form first. [4]

• پښتو, "Pashto": paçto, against paṣto at Kandahar and paxto at Peshawar.

• شپږ, "six": špəg, against špaẓ at Kandahar and špag at Peshawar.

• څوک, "who": sok, against ʦok at Kandahar.

Tegey and Robson give the same contrast in other words. The Pashto word ښاخ, "branch", is said with a palatal x in the central dialect, a retroflex sh at Kandahar and kh in the east. The word ژور, "deep", is zawér in the central dialect and jawér in the east, and begins with a retroflex zh in the west. [3]

The other consonants

Three more letters help place the group. The consortium report and David's table of MacKenzie's dialects agree that the north-western speakers say څ as s and ځ as z, where Kandahar keeps the affricates ts and dz. [4, 9] Penzl's "Eastern" dialect, which David sets beside the north-western one, keeps ts for څ but has z for ځ. [4] The sources therefore split on whether ts survives. David's own table gives pinzə for "five" (پنځه) in the north-west, with the z. [4]

For ژ, Tegey and Robson and the consortium report give z in the central dialect, and Kieffer's word for "mill" in the middle column is zranda, where Kandahar has žrandə and Jalalabad ǰranda. [3, 7, 9] David's table prints ž and notes that Tegey and Robson have /z/. [4] Kieffer, as David reports him, linked the plain š and ž of the south-east with Ghazni, a different placing from MacKenzie's. [4]

Vowels and the shift that Wardak lacks

Most Karlani dialects, among them Waziri, shift three vowels: ā, o and u move towards o, e and i, a change Corey Miller called the Waziri chain shift. [6] Morgenstierne put the vowel changes in the mountain dialects "from Afridi to Waziri". [2, 8] David's Middle dialects are noted mainly for them. [4]

Wardak does not take part in the shift. Khan quotes Dennis Coyle's thesis: "vowel shift has not occurred in Wardak Pashto". [6] He adds that Wardag speakers do move o closer to i or e and u closer to i, and that ā is said as å. [6] Morgenstierne had met the rounding of ā to å and â in the mountain dialects, where plār, "father", becomes plâr or plår. [8] Khan's example from a speaker in Sheikhabad village, Saydabad district, shows it in a sentence:

نو مور او پلور ته مه ام ورکړي داسې

No mor aw plår tə mə əm war-kə́ṛi dāse

So like this I have given it to [my] mother and father also

The sentence is Khan's, taken from a Zhwandoon television programme of 2020, with his own transliteration and gloss. [6] The word for "father" is spelled پلور there, with the letter و for the rounded vowel, where David writes پلار for the standard form. [4, 6]

Grammar

The grammar of this group is less fully described than its sounds, but several features are on record.

Morgenstierne noted that Pashto has no article, yet in some Ghilzai dialects a short unstressed a is on the way to becoming one: a saṛī ta, "to the man", and a spay, "the dog". [8] In 1932 he recorded another Ghilzai habit. In some dialects consonants are regularly palatalised before palatal vowels, so that "woman" is x̌əja with the plural x̌əj'e, and the palatalisation is lost before a back vowel. He called this a comparatively archaic stage. [2]

David's examples carry a few north-western forms. The optative ending, used after kə, "if", is -ay in the north-west (rased(əl)ay, رسېدلی, from "to arrive"), -āy in the south-west and south-east and -e in the north-east. [4] Lorenz and Heston describe an ending on masculine nouns after a numeral (dwa halə́ka, "two boys", north-eastern), where David's north-western informant said "four camels" with the plain plural, salur uxān (څلور اوښان). [4] The north-western word for "mosquito" in her list is miāšə (میاشه), where Kandahar has ɣomāšə (غماشه). [4]

Tegey and Robson state that their grammar is based on the central dialect, in contrast to Penzl's grammar of Kandahar, and that many of their differences from Penzl can be traced to that. [3] David notes that interlinear examples she draws from written material are transcribed as they might be spoken in the north-east. [4]

Wardak

Dennis Coyle's thesis, Placing Wardak among Pashto varieties (2014), says that most of the roughly one million Wardak speakers live in Wardak province south of Kabul, that all Wardaks think of themselves as Pashtun, and that their speech is nonetheless considered different from other Pashto. [5] Tegey and Robson had already named Wardak, with Waziri, among the dialects "observed to differ markedly" from the rest. [3]

Coyle tested the question with word lists, recorded-text comprehension tests and a questionnaire on language use and attitudes. His answer is that "Wardak is a dialect of Pashto". [5] He found that the needs of many Wardaks are met by the existing school curriculum and literature, that some would gain from a limited local project, and that a Wardak identity would be helped by more books, poems and songs written in their own speech. [5] He also suggested a link with the varieties of Khost and Paktia, because Wardak speakers share with them a common ancestor, Karlan. [5]

Khan places the Wardags among the northern Karlani tribes and says they moved from Birmal, in the Sulaiman range, to their present home about 1730. He bases the date on Charles Mason, who wrote in 1832 that the Afghans had expelled the Hazaras from Wardak "about one hundred years since", and on a Pashto history by Talebi (1950–51). [6] The consortium report groups Wardak with the central Ghilzai. [9]

Between Kandahari and Peshawari

The central group sits between the two prestige dialects. The consortium report names Kandahari the most prestigious dialect and the basis of written Pashto, so the same letters are written by everyone and said in the local way. [9] Morgenstierne observed in Kabul that a modified Kandahar dialect was used among the higher classes, and that the orthography used in Kabul was based on Durrani pronunciation, differing from the classical and Peshawar standard. [1]

In his 1932 report he also suggested that when Pashto spelling was fixed in the sixteenth century, even the north-eastern tribes, whom he thought the likely creators of the literature, still said ښ and ږ with the older sibilants. [2] David writes that the palatal ç of the Eastern dialect "can be seen as an intermediate step" between the retroflex ṣ̌ of Kandahar and the velar x of Peshawar. [4]

Hanifi adds a view from the Ghilzai side. In Afghanistan, he writes, they insist on three things together: having Pashto, doing Pashto and speaking Pashto (Paxtū larel, Paxtū kawel and Paxtū wayel), which puts competence in the spoken language at the centre of Pashtun identity. [10]

The wider setting of the language is in Pashto: language family and dialect variation, and the other dialect groups are set out in Pashto dialects: soft and hard speech. The city where the group meets its neighbours is the subject of Kabul and its Pashtuns.