Kakari and Quetta Pashto: the south-eastern dialect

At a glance

• Kakari and Quetta Pashto belong to the south-eastern group of Pashto dialects, the fourth corner of MacKenzie's quadrant, which he tied to Quetta. [5]

• Its mark is in five letters. ښ and ږ are plain š and ž, not Kandahar's retroflex sounds or Peshawar's kh and g, and څ and ځ stay ts and dz. [2, 5, 7]

• The language is Pashto there, with an ordinary sh. [7]

• Josef Elfenbein's tribal list for the group, as David prints it, names the Sherani, Kakari, Achakzai, Tarin and Wanetsi, with Waziri and Bannu speech beside them in the Linguistic Data Consortium's version. [5, 7]

• Kakari is the local variety the older surveys name. Denys Bray's census report of 1911 lists its habits, and Morgenstierne noted its vowels at Shahrig. [2, 8]

• The group's edge is argued over. George Grierson put the Pashto of Pishin with Kandahar, not with a separate south-east. [3, 5]

Where it is spoken

David's grammar of 2014 places Pashto in Pakistan in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the tribal districts and "northeastern Balochistan, including the city of Quetta". [5] Grierson's Linguistic Survey, in 1921, named the districts as Quetta-Pishin, Loralai, Zhob and Sibi, and said Pashto was the main language of Zhob and of nearly the whole of Quetta and Loralai districts. [3] In Zhob the census had found Balochi almost absent, 22 speakers in a population of over 70,000. [3] The Quetta-Pishin Gazetteer of 1907 said Pashto was used by the Afghans, who made up over 77 per cent of the district's rural population. [4] The present counts, by district, are in the Pashtuns of Balochistan, and the town's story is in Quetta.

Elfenbein's grouping, as David lays it out, gives the south-east the southern districts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan, "includes Quetta", and names its tribes as the Sherani, Kakari, Achakzai, Tarin and Wanetsi. [5] The Linguistic Data Consortium's Pashto report, which follows Elfenbein, lists the same places and adds Bannu and both the northern and southern Waziri. [7] The article on Pashto dialects sets the south-east beside the other three regions, and Kandahari Pashto describes the dialect it is most often compared with.

The sounds

MacKenzie's four-dialect scheme of 1959 uses the cardinal points, and David reports that the remaining dialect, the south-east, is the one he associates with Quetta. David describes it as having lost the retroflexion in ښ and ږ that the south-west keeps, so they are said š and ž, the same sounds as the letters ش and ژ. David adds that Charles Kieffer in 1974 tied this feature to Ghazni, in Afghanistan. [5] David's table of the letters gives the same values: ږ is ẓ̌ in Kandahar, ž in Quetta and g in Peshawar, ښ is ṣ̌ in Kandahar, š in Quetta and x in the east, and څ and ځ are ts and dz in both the south-west and the south-east. [5]

Bray, writing the census report of Baluchistan in 1911, drew the line without those labels. He called the speech of the indigenous tribesmen of Balochistan the "Pshto" branch, as against the "Pukhto" of Peshawar, and named four sounds, ts, dz, sh and zh, as the real barrier between them. [2] Bray was a British census officer, and the labels are his; the sounds are the same ones the later linguists use.

Wiktionary gives a south-eastern pronunciation for three common words. The name of the language, پښتو, is /pəʃˈt̪o/ there, against /pəʂˈt̪o/ in Kandahar and /pʊxˈt̪o/ in Peshawar. [9] ښه, "good", is /ʃə/ in the south-east and /ʂə/ in Kandahar. [9] شپږ, "six", is /ʃpaʒ/ in the south-east, /ʃpaʐ/ in the south-west and /ʃpaɡ/ in the north-east, so only the last sound changes. [9]

The Linguistic Data Consortium report adds some small habits of the south-eastern speakers. In some words z is palatalised to ž, and in some ṣ̌ becomes š. In both the south-west and the south-east, š can be depalatalised to s. [7] Grierson's Pishin and Kandahar specimens, which came to him from the Agent to the Governor-General in Baluchistan, show the same thing: "the main peculiarity is the preference for s instead of sh", so sam and not sham, "I am", and ke for "in", not kshe. [3]

What Kakari does

Bray named Kakari first among the "many local dialects" of Balochistan, and listed what he thought set it apart. [2]

• The vowel ē of standard Pashto becomes a: rəpazhəm for rəpēzhəm, "I tremble", and dars for dērs, "thirty". [2]

• The masculine vocative ending -a is also used for women: mōr-a, "oh mother!", and khōr-a, "oh sister!". [2]

• Irregular plurals are made regular, with sarīān for sṛi, "men". [2]

Bray wrote that the second and third of these struck other Pashtuns most. [2] He gave the Luni a softening of ts to ch, so chok for tsok, "who?", and noted that the Sherani shared Kakari's ē to a change. For the Mando Khel he gave a tendency to turn the old z into d, də mā for zmā, "my". [2] These are Bray's own sketches of neighbouring speech and are given as his.

Georg Morgenstierne, in the Encyclopaedia Iranica, singled out the Kakari of Shahrig in Balochistan for "Waziri" vowels, līr for lūr, "daughter", and calēr, "four". [8] He added three details from the Kakari verb and vocabulary. Several dialects "from Afridi to Kakari" say drēy for "three". [8] Kakari has -āž- where other dialects have -eğ-, the ending he lists for the present stem of intransitive verbs of what is happening just now, as in "look, a snake is creeping". [8] And Kakari keeps pyār and plyār for "father", forms Morgenstierne calls relics of an old loss of t between vowels, where Wanetsi says piyār. [8] Wanetsi, spoken between Harnai and Loralai, is covered in Pashto dialects.

The town's own name is a Pashto sound change. Morgenstierne lists Kwaṭa, "Quetta", among Indo-Aryan loanwords whose old ō has broken to wa, from kōt, "fort". [8] The Quetta-Pishin Gazetteer says Kwatta means a fort, while Bray rejected that and called it a Pashto word for a heap; both views are set out in Quetta.

A sentence on the page

Grierson printed a translation of the parable of the prodigal son in transliteration, from specimens he said came from "the Pashto spoken round Kandahar and Pishin". He did not separate the two places. [3] The first words show dz and a clause with a vocative:

Dzōī warta wowayal chē, 'ai plārā, mā da Khudāi au stā ḍēra gunāh karē-da.'

By the son it was said to him: "O father, I have done great sin against God and against you." (Grierson's interlinear gloss runs "by-me of God and of-thee great sin done-has-been".) [3]

The same page has tsakha, "among", with its ts. [3] For the Pashto of the rest of Baluchistan, Grierson printed Bray's account from the 1911 report. [3]

Reading the same letters

The written language does not show most of this. The Linguistic Data Consortium report says the standard spelling follows the Kandahar dialect, so that a reader in Quetta or Peshawar pronounces the same letters in his own way. [7] The report counts about 9.7 million speakers of the northern dialects and about 2.7 million of the southern ones, and puts the lexical overlap between the two at about 80 per cent. [7] David notes that the dotted letters are retroflex only in Kandahar's speech and take other values elsewhere. [5] A Quetta reader of ښه therefore says šə where a Kandahar reader says ṣ̌ə and a Peshawar reader xə. [9]

Words from other languages

Quetta has always sat among several languages, and the Pashto of the town has taken from them. The Gazetteer of 1907 said Persian was spoken by Kandaharis and Hazaras and by the leading Achakzai men of Pishin, that a corrupted form called Dehwari was spoken by the Saiads of Kirani and some Kasi Afghans, and that the medium of correspondence, outside official documents, was Persian. [4] It also said that Urdu was the language of the courts, and that a modified form of it, brought by officials from the Derajat in the early days of British rule, was spreading among the local people, especially in the villages round Quetta. [4] The Linguistic Data Consortium lists Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Punjabi, English and Greek as sources of Pashto loanwords generally. [7]

A study in Jahan-e-Tahqeeq in 2024, by Sajid Ali and three co-authors, compares the vocabulary of Quetta and Kandahar. Its abstract argues that Kandahari is lexically more active in making new words, and that the Quetta dialect shows changes in the sounds of its borrowed words. [6] It treats Quetta and Kandahar as forms of one "Western" dialect, a different grouping from the south-eastern one above. [6]

Where Quetta belongs

The sources do not agree about Quetta. MacKenzie, Elfenbein and the Linguistic Data Consortium give it its own quadrant. [5, 7] Wiktionary labels its pronunciations south-eastern. [9] Grierson, in 1921, wrote of Pashto in Baluchistan as South-Western, and David reports that his standard word list for the South-Western dialect was taken from Pishin and Kandahar. [3, 5] Both readings can be seen in the sounds. Quetta keeps ts and dz like Kandahar, loses the retroflexion that Kandahar keeps, and shares with Kandahar the š to s habit. [3, 5, 7]

Pashto in Quetta now

The Pashto Academy Balochistan in Quetta, پښتو اکېډمۍ بلوچستان کوټه, began work in Quetta in 1971 and was registered in 1973 under the Societies Act of 1860. [1] It is run by a 15-member executive council elected by a general body of 35 members, and its members work voluntarily. [1] Like the Baloch and Brahui academies, it receives an annual grant from the Government of Balochistan. [1]

Its stated aims are to publish books and a magazine on Pashto language and literature, to link writers, researchers and universities, to publish classical Pashto texts, and to run Pashto literacy courses for Pashto and non-Pashto speakers. [1] Its website lists issues of its magazine from 1984 to 2015, and says it has held a series of international seminars since 2015, beginning with the International Pashto Conference and Pashtun Culture Day. [1] It names seminars held in honour of figures of what it calls southern Pakhtunkhwa. [1]

Writers from Kakar and Quetta country appear in other articles here. Pir Muhammad Kakar was a Kakar poet and teacher of Ahmad Shah's time, and the media of the wider Pashto world are in Pashto media. How the census counts Pashto speakers in Balochistan is in Pashto speakers in Pakistan's censuses.