Kandahari Pashto: the south-western dialect

At a glance

• Kandahari Pashto is the south-western dialect, the "soft" speech that says Paṣ̌tō (پښتو) with a retroflex sh. Its home is Kandahar and the provinces round it. [1, 2]

• It keeps the old retroflex sounds ṣ̌ and ẓ̌ for the letters ښ and ږ, and keeps ts and dz for څ and ځ, where Peshawar says kh, g, s and z. [1, 3]

• Pashto spelling follows it. The dialect is spoken by fewer people than the northern ones, a Linguistic Data Consortium report counting about 2.7 million southern speakers against 9.7 million northern, yet the same report calls it the most prestigious form of the language. [5]

• Herbert Penzl described it in A Grammar of Pashto (1955), subtitled "a descriptive study of the dialect of Kandahar", and later grammarians still compare their own dialect against his book. [1, 2]

• Its edges are argued over. Sources disagree on whether the Ghilzai of Zabul and Ghazni speak it, and on whether Quetta belongs to it. [1, 2, 5]

Where it is spoken

David's descriptive grammar of 2014 lists the provinces where Pashto is mainly spoken in the south-west of Afghanistan as Kandahar, Helmand, Uruzgan and Zabul, with Herat and Farah in the west. [1] Charles Kieffer, writing in the Encyclopaedia Iranica, gives Pashto as the majority language "from Katawaz to Farah", and calls the western group of dialects, which he labels A, Maghrebi or Kandahari. [4] Josef Elfenbein's list, as David reports it, gives the south-west group as Kandahar, Farah, Herat and the southern Ghilzai. [1] The Linguistic Data Consortium's four-dialect map uses the same places. [5]

The boundary north and east of Kandahar is the hard part. George Grierson's Linguistic Survey of India, quoted in David's grammar, draws the line at the southern limit of the great Ghilzai tribe, a stone bridge at Asia Hazara twelve miles south of Kalat-i Ghilzai, and says the Ghilzai speak the north-eastern dialect while "all Afghans south of this line and westwards towards Herat" speak the south-western one. [1] Grierson also takes the line along the Kundar river towards Peshawar so that Waziris and Khattaks fall on the north-eastern side. [1] Later writers do not agree about the Ghilzai. Olaf Caroe said they speak a soft dialect like the Durranis, and a later linguist, Anderson, said a hard one, as David reports. [1] Kieffer found a belt of mixed speech between Kandahar and Jalalabad, mostly Ghilzai, and counted it as its own intermediate group. [4]

Quetta is a second case. Tegey and Robson, whose reference grammar rests on the Kabul dialect, say speakers of the Kandahar dialect live mostly in south-western Afghanistan and in Balochistan, and that the neighbouring Waziris share some of its characteristics, "notably the same set of retroflex consonants". [2] The MacKenzie and Elfenbein scheme instead gives Quetta a dialect of its own. It has lost the retroflexion, so ښ and ږ are plain sh and zh, but it keeps ts and dz. [1, 5] Elfenbein's table, as David gives it, puts the Waziri, Bannu, Sherani, Kakari, Achakzai, Tarin and Wanetsi in that south-eastern group. [1]

Two letters that say where you are from

The commonest test of a Pashto speaker's home is ښ and ږ. Georg Morgenstierne, whose survey of Pashto the Encyclopaedia Iranica prints, wrote that the usual transliteration of these two letters as x̌ and ǧ "veils the most obvious if not the most important" division of the dialects. In the south-western soft group they remain sibilants, usually retroflex ṣ̌ and ẓ̌, said with the tongue curled back, though in some small areas they merge with the more palatal š and ž. In the hard north-eastern dialects they merge with x and g. [3]

Tegey and Robson's table of the three main dialects says the same: ښ is retroflex in the western or Kandahar dialect and a velar fricative in the central and eastern ones. [2] The letters themselves are one set of spellings. David notes that the dotted letters are retroflex only in the Kandahar dialect and take other values elsewhere. [1]

The sounds come with a second rule. The dental affricates ts and dz, written څ and ځ, stay in Kandahar, and are simplified to s and z in the north-east. [1, 3] The letter ژ is an ordinary zh in Kandahar and an affricate j in the north-east. [1, 2] Kandahar therefore keeps five sounds that Morgenstierne counted as lost in the Peshawar region. He linked the loss there to long contact with Indo-Aryan neighbours, whose languages have none of them. [3]

A few ordinary words show it. The forms in square brackets are the Kandahar and other pronunciations that Wiktionary records for each word, and the rest come from Kieffer's and Tegey and Robson's tables.

• ښځه, "woman": Kandahari ṣ̌əjə (Wiktionary gives [ʂəˈd͡za]), against x̌əza in the intermediate belt and xəja in the Jalalabad east. [4, 7]

• ږیره, "beard": ẓ̌irə in Kandahar, γ̌ira in the intermediate belt and gira in the east. [4]

• ژرنده, "mill": žrandə in Kandahar, zranda in the middle and ǰranda in the east. [4]

• ښار, "city": Kandahar [ʂɑr], Peshawar [xɑr]. [7]

• پښه, "foot": Kandahar [pʂa], against [pxa] in the north and [xpa] in the north-east, where the consonants have swapped places. [7]

• شپږ, "six": the south-western pronunciation [ʃpaʐ] keeps two distinct sibilants, an ordinary š at the start and the retroflex ẓ̌ at the end. The north-east says [ʃpaɡ]. [7]

• ښاخ, "branch": Tegey and Robson give ṣ̌ākh in the west and khākh in the east. Their moon, سپوږمۍ, is spoẓ̌məy in the west and spogməy elsewhere. [2, 7]

سپوږمۍ په شپه کې ځلېږي۔

spoẓ̌məy pə špa ke dzaleẓ̌i.

The moon shines at night. (Wiktionary's example sentence; the Kandahari pronunciation of ږ is ẓ̌.) [7]

The name of the language shows the rule in miniature: Paṣ̌tō in Kandahar, Pakhto in Peshawar, Pashto in Quetta. [2, 5] The article on Pashto dialects sets all four regions side by side, and Pashto: language family and dialect variation places them within the language as a whole.

Smaller sound features

Morgenstierne notes that in some southern dialects w and y harden to b and g before an i or y sound, giving byešta for "hair" and bidə for "asleep". He does not say which southern towns do this. [3] The same entry records that Pashto vowels are a, i, u, ə, ā, ī, ū, e and o. In most dialects ī and ū have shortened, and a and ə overlap in some. [3]

Penzl's account of the vowels, as David summarises it, separates ey from ei where other grammars keep one sound, and has no oy. [1]

Tegey and Robson add a small habit of Kandahari speech: the third person masculine "is" is said dey, where some eastern dialects say dag, and in reading or formal speech everyone says day. [2]

Grammar: where Kandahar differs

Most of Pashto grammar is the same everywhere: gender in every part of speech, an ergative construction in the past tense, and a long list of plural endings. Kieffer's own illustration is the adjective xōẓ̌, "sweet", which has six forms where Persian has one. [4] Kieffer explains that in the past tense the verb of a transitive sentence agrees with the person acted on, so that "I struck you" is literally "of me you were hit". [4] The Kandahar details are smaller, and David reports them from Penzl.

• Class I feminine nouns that end in a vowel show some variety in their plural endings, and Penzl reports that the forms with w are more common in Kandahari, though not found only there. [1]

• The masculine vocative singular of Class IIIb adjectives and nouns is -e in Penzl's Kandahari, where a grammar of the eastern dialects gives -ya. David judges the -e form may be commoner in the east than the books say. [1]

• A group of adjectives centralise their last vowel in feminine and plural forms. Penzl reports that some Kandahari speakers keep the full vowel in every form. [1]

• Penzl gives a Kandahari example with object-subject-verb order, which he says puts the focus on the object, and says that reported speech in Kandahari is only direct. David notes that another example seems to contradict him and leaves it to later research whether the difference is dialect, register or style. He also reports Shafeev's claim of 1964 that in Kandahari the indirect object tends to come before the direct object. [1]

• Tegey and Robson note that the word for "horse" has two different sets of masculine endings in the Kandahar dialect, where it has one in the Kabul dialect. [2]

Tegey and Robson warn why this matters when comparing their grammar with Penzl's: many differences between the two books come from the dialects, since theirs rests on the Kabul dialect and his on Kandahar's. [2]

Vocabulary and borrowing

The south is not a uniform dialect of words. Tegey and Robson say speakers of the Kandahar and Kabul dialects, being in Afghanistan, are more likely to borrow words from Persian, where the eastern speech borrows from Urdu and English. [2] David, drawing on Heston's grammar, gives an example: Afghan speakers tend to say tašakur for "thanks", the Persian word, where Pakistani speakers say šukriya, from Urdu, and both share an Arabic root. Beside both stands a native Pashto word meaning literally "compliance, submission". [1] David adds that the dialects of Afghanistan carry more loanwords and cognates from Persian and Turkic. [1]

This reflects the role of Persian in Kandahar's history. Kandahar was the first political centre of the Durrani state under Ahmad Shah in 1747 and remained so until the capital moved to Kabul in 1775. [6] Christine Noelle-Karimi notes that for the Sadozai period, works like Khushal Khan Khattak's show a Pashto literature produced locally, while Persian was the main medium of writing about state and administration. [6]

The prestige of Kandahar

Kandahari Pashto is the basis of the written language. The Linguistic Data Consortium calls it "the most prestigious dialect" and says its pronunciation underlies the standard spelling, and a reader from another region reads the same letters in his own way. [5] Tegey and Robson put it more modestly: each Pashtun considers his own speech the normal one, though the Kandahar dialect has the most prestige "at least among the Kandaharis" and serves as the basis for the writing system. [2]

They also give a reason of their own. The Khattak, in their account the clan that effectively established the Pashto literary tradition, spoke the Kandahar dialect, and its spelling still reflects that dialect more than the central or eastern ones. [2] Grierson's boundary, by contrast, gives the Khattaks to the north-eastern side. [1] Tegey and Robson place the Khattaks at Kohat. [2] Morgenstierne, for his part, held that nearly every modern Pashto dialect can be traced to a form close to the classical literary language of the sixteenth century. [3] The poet who did most to fix that literary language is the subject of Khushal Khan Khattak.

The modern institutions came later. Nadir Shah founded a Literary Society in Kabul and a Pashto Society (Paṣ̌tō anjoman) in Kandahar in the early 1930s. The monthly Kabul, begun in 1931, changed its language to Pashto with the creation of the Pashto Academy (Paṣ̌tō ṭolana) in Kabul in 1937. [6] Abdul Hai Habibi, a native of Kandahar, was president of the Pashto Academy in 1940. [6] Kandahar's writers are covered elsewhere on the site: Abdul Rauf Benawa and Abdul Bari Jahani in the twentieth century, Pir Muhammad Kakar in Ahmad Shah's time, and Ahmad Shah's own poems. Mirwais Hotak led the rising of 1709. [6]

The written standard does hide the variation. A reader in Peshawar says the same letters with different sounds, and in Pakistan, writers sometimes substitute Urdu letter forms that lose Pashto's distinctions among the five forms of ye. [5] Many Pashtuns are, as Tegey and Robson say, sensitive only to the obvious differences in pronunciation and vocabulary, and the speakers of most dialects are readily understood by almost all others. [2] The Linguistic Data Consortium measures the lexical similarity between northern and southern Pashto at about 80 per cent. [5]