The Pashto alphabet: letters, sounds and grammar

An Eastern Iranian language in an adapted script

Pashto (پښتو) is an Iranian language. Its sound system places it in the eastern group of Iranian languages, and over many centuries it has also borrowed a great deal of vocabulary from neighbouring Indo-Aryan languages. Georg Morgenstierne's survey in the Encyclopaedia Iranica places it in southern and south-eastern Afghanistan, among more recent settlers in northern Afghanistan, in north-western Pakistan and Balochistan, and along Iran's eastern border. [1] [3]

Pashto is written right to left in a form of the Arabic script, the same family of alphabets used for Persian and Urdu. Writing in Pashto has a long history: the spelling of what scholars call classical Pashto is recorded from the sixteenth century onwards. As in Persian and Arabic, short vowels are normally left unwritten, and the Library of Congress romanisation table notes that vowel points are rarely found in Pashto writing and printing. [1] [2]

The letters Pashto adds

To write sounds the Arabic alphabet has no letters for, Pashto uses letters of its own, most of them formed by adding a small ring or extra dots to an existing letter. The Library of Congress table lists the following Pashto-specific consonants with their standard library romanisation: [2]

• ټ (ṭ), a retroflex t

• ډ (ḍ), a retroflex d

• ړ (ṛ), a retroflex r

• ڼ (ṇ), a retroflex n

• څ (ṡ), pronounced ts in the south-western standard

• ځ (ż), pronounced dz in the south-western standard

• ښ (ṣh), a sound that differs sharply between dialects

• ږ (ẓh), the voiced partner of ښ

• ګ (g), the Pashto form of the letter g [2] [4]

Pashto also uses several forms of the letter ye (ي) to mark different vowels. The Library of Congress table shows ې for an e sound, and ۍ and ئ for a final sound romanised as ạy. A language-documentation report for the Linguistic Data Consortium counts five ye symbols in all, and notes that in Pakistan writers sometimes substitute Urdu letter forms that do not keep these Pashto distinctions apart. [2] [4]

Retroflex sounds and dental affricates

Retroflex consonants are made with the tip of the tongue curled back towards the roof of the mouth. Morgenstierne notes that Pashto ṭ (ټ) and ḍ (ډ) occur mainly in words borrowed from Indo-Aryan languages, although many of these borrowings are so old that speakers no longer feel them to be foreign. Retroflex ṇ (ڼ) and ṛ (ړ), by contrast, belong to the native word stock: the ṛ in kəṛ, 'made', and zṛə, 'heart', developed from an older Iranian rt or rd. [1]

The letters څ and ځ stand for the dental affricates ts and dz, which Morgenstierne writes as c and j. These sounds are characteristic of Pashto, as in calor, 'four'. They are not stable everywhere, however: in the Peshawar region c and j have merged with s and z, part of a wider shift that is discussed in the article on Pashto dialects. [1] [4]

Two letters that divide the dialects

The letters ښ and ږ are the clearest marker of regional speech. In the south-western dialects around Kandahar they are pronounced as retroflex sibilants, transcribed ṣ̌ and ẓ̌. In the north-eastern dialects they merge with x (like the ch in Scottish loch) and g. Between the two lies an intermediate zone, mainly among Ghilzai speakers, where mixed and transitional pronunciations are heard. This is why the language's own name appears in English as both Pashto and Pakhto. [1]

Morgenstierne argues that the 'hard' pronunciation of ښ as x is relatively recent and limited to the north-east, and points to the spelling among his evidence. Charles Kieffer illustrates the difference with the word for 'woman', ښځه, which is ṣ̌əjə in Kandahari speech and xəja in the north-east. [1] [3]

Nouns: two genders and case endings

Unlike Persian, Pashto has kept a full distinction between masculine and feminine. Kieffer notes that gender runs through all nominal forms, which are also inflected for two and sometimes three cases. His example is the adjective xōẓ̌, 'sweet', which has six different forms depending on gender, number and case, where Persian uses a single form, xoš. [3]

Most feminine nouns end in -a, while many masculine nouns end in a consonant or in -ay. Gender also reaches into the verb: Morgenstierne observes that it is marked on the past participle and on the verb forms built from it, and even on the third person of the auxiliary verb, so that 'he is' and 'she is' are day and da. [1]

Verbs, ergativity and word order

The best-known feature of Pashto grammar is its ergative construction in the past tenses. In the present tense the verb agrees with the subject: zə tā wahəm, 'I strike you'. In the past tense of a transitive verb, the doer appears in the oblique case and the verb agrees with the object instead: mā tə wahəlē, 'I struck you', which Kieffer glosses literally as 'of me you were hit'. [3]

Linguists call this split ergativity: the verb agrees with the subject in the present tense but with the object in transitive sentences in the past, and in Pashto that agreement includes gender. Morgenstierne adds that Pashto applies this pattern more strictly than most Iranian languages, and suggests that contact with neighbouring Indo-Aryan languages, which share the pattern, may have reinforced it. [5] [1]

Pashto word order is basically subject, object, verb, with the verb at the end of the clause. A recent comparative study from Balkh University describes the order as SOV-based but flexible, made possible by the rich verb agreement and case marking that keep the roles of subject and object clear. [5]