Standard written Pashto: one spelling for every dialect

At a glance

• Written Pashto has one spelling for every dialect. The letters ښ ږ څ ځ are written the same in Kandahar and Peshawar, though a Peshawar speaker says kh, g, s and z where a Kandahari says ṣ̌, ẓ̌, ts and dz. [4, 5]

• Herbert Penzl, who studied the dialects in Afghanistan in 1958 and 1959, found that the spelling follows the sound system of Kandahar and called the result a written standard only. He found no spoken standard. [4]

• D. N. MacKenzie defined the standard in 1959 as the sound system behind the classical spelling of Khushal Khan and Rahman Baba. [5]

• The rules were settled by Pashtun writers in committee: at Kabul in 1942, 1948 and 1958 under the Pashto Tolana, and at Bara Gali in Swat in 1990 under the Pashto Academy of Peshawar. [4, 6, 8]

• Pashto has been an official language of Afghanistan since a royal decree of 1936. In Pakistan it has no national status, and a province may teach it by law. [1, 3, 10]

• Afghan and Peshawar spellings still differ, and in August 2026 a workshop in Kabul met to reconcile Pashto and Dari writing. [12, 19]

One spelling for four pronunciations

Take the word for "woman", ښځه. In Kandahar it is said ṣ̌əjə, with a retroflex sh. Charles Kieffer's table in the Encyclopaedia Iranica gives xəja for the north-east, the speech of Jalalabad and Peshawar. [10] The beard, ږیره, goes ẓ̌irə in Kandahar and gira in the north-east. [10] The spelling does not change. Georg Morgenstierne wrote that the hard pronunciation of the north-east is of recent origin, "as shown inter alia by the orthography", because the letters still record the older sibilant. [9]

Penzl described how this works in a study of the standard and the dialects, printed at Kabul in 1959. The standard orthography follows the sound distinctions of Kandahar, he wrote, and speakers of dialects that have lost some of them still use it when they write, and try to keep the distinctions on paper. [4] A writer in Peshawar, where ṣ̌ has joined x and ts has joined s, still spells ښه, "good", and څوک, "who", with the Kandahar letters. [4] The sounds are described in Pashto dialects, and the letters in the Pashto alphabet and grammar. What follows is how the shared spelling was agreed and who still argues about it.

Other differences are small. MacKenzie said that the morphological differences between the extreme north-eastern and south-western dialects are "comparatively few and unimportant", and that with an alphabet that disguises the phonological ones Pashto "has, therefore, been a literary vehicle, widely understood, for at least four centuries". [5]

Where the spelling came from

The classical orthography is recorded from the sixteenth century. Morgenstierne counted thirty-one consonants in it, among them letters that only Arabic loanwords use. [9] MacKenzie counted 36 consonant signs in the alphabet of 1959, seven of them used almost only in Arabic words and standing for no sound of their own. [5]

Where the alphabet was made is argued. Penzl reasoned that Kandahar is the only dialect whose sounds match the special Pashto letters one for one, and concluded that the signs "were created in the area of the Kandahar dialect". [5] Morgenstierne had thought that when the orthography was fixed the distinction between ṣ̌ and x was still kept even among the north-eastern tribes, who were probably the makers of Pashto literature. [5] MacKenzie sided with the north-east. The earliest known Pashto manuscript, of 1651, and a manuscript of the poet Mirza of 1690 use an older set of signs than the one now printed. A copyist of the Yusufzai poet Najib in 1696 changed them to the new signs while keeping the distinctions, which suggested to MacKenzie that the new letters still stood for separate sounds in the north-east. [5]

Pashtun writers tell the same history in their own way. A 2025 article by three Pashto teachers at Kunar and Nangarhar universities starts with Pir Roshan's thirteen letters for sounds Arabic lacks, passes to the script of Khushal Khan Khattak, in which his works and those of his sons and grandsons are written, and says that the script of the Ahmad Shahi period varied with each writer's taste. [6]

The Pashto Tolana and the Kabul meetings

Standardisation as a public effort began in the 1930s. The Kabul Literary Society's monthly Kabul, started in 1931, turned to Pashto when the Pashto Academy, the Pashto Tolana (پښتو ټولنه), was created in 1937. [11] The Nangarhar authors add that the Pashto Society of Kandahar merged into the Kabul body in 1316 SH (1937–38), and that the Tolana made its first organised effort to unify the writing in 1321 (1942). [6] Kieffer dates the royal decree that made Pashto an official language to 1936. [10] Hashim Khan and Shah Mahmud Khan tells the politics of those years.

The Nangarhar authors list three meetings. Penzl and MacKenzie, both writing in 1959, confirm the first and the last. [4–6]

• On 21 Jawza 1321 (1942) twenty-five writers and scholars of Afghanistan met at the request of the Tolana and decided twenty-one disputed cases. [6]

• In 1327 (1948) nineteen writers and scholars met at Kabul and decided further forms, among them whether a word may be written without a hamza. [6]

• In August 1958 Pashtun writers and scholars from Peshawar and Balochistan came to Kabul at the Tolana's invitation. MacKenzie says the proposals, printed in the magazine Kabul no. 465 of 23 September 1958, "represent in the main a welcome return to the classical standard". [5, 6]

In Afghanistan the decisions had some government backing, the Nangarhar authors write, and in Pakistan they were applied weakly because the press was free. [6] They also report Ziyar, who thought little of the meetings: in earlier days, he said, a Kandahari form was accepted if more Kandaharis raised their hands and a Nangarhari form if more men of Nangarhar did, and the minister Mohammad Gul Khan Momand wanted a standard by show of hands and a referendum, which Ziyar thought could not work for a language. [6] Dawn names a minister, Gul Mohammad Wazir Mohmand, whose proposal to change the script in 1939 was not adopted. [13]

The grammarians who did not agree

Penzl read the Afghan grammars to see how far each writer treated his own dialect as the standard. Saleh Muhammad Khan and Muhammad Azam Ayazi wrote from Kandahar, Siddiqullah Rishtin from Nangarhar and Qazi Rahimullah Khan from Peshawar, and each prefers the plural and past endings of his own speech. [4] Some Kandahari writers, Saleh Muhammad and Abdul Hai Habibi among them, spelled certain frequent words in ways the meeting of 1942 rejected, and Ayazi and Abdul Rauf Benawa avoided them. [4] Benawa and Gul Pacha Ulfat, who both led the Academy, have articles of their own.

The meetings dealt in particulars. In 1958 the Academy warned against writing z or j for zh in ژبه, "tongue, language", as speakers do where those sounds have merged. [4] It also condemned a Peshawar habit. Peshawar says a plain e where other dialects keep a diphthong, and some Peshawar printers wrote the letter for e, ې, in its place. [4]

Rahimullah's Modern Pushtu Instructor (Peshawar, 1938) went the other way on speech. It gave a Roman transcription of his own Peshawar pronunciation, for example khaza for "woman", and taught that to foreigners as correct. [4]

Peshawar and the Pashto Academy

Maulana Abdul Qadir founded the Pashto Academy at the University of Peshawar in 1955, according to Prof Hanif Khalil, speaking at a seminar in his memory in 2023. [14] Habibullah Tegey and Barbara Robson, in a reference grammar of 1996, say it grew up beside the Kabul academy and that its publications had come to follow the standards Kabul recommended, though written Pakistani Pashto, they add, shows more influence from English and Urdu. [7]

In July 1990 the Academy held a seminar at Bara Gali in Swat. About a hundred writers and linguists took part, at the Academy's initiative and on the provincial government's recommendation, and a working committee met three times before a plenary session issued unanimous decisions. [6] Dawn counts seventeen. [13] Those the Nangarhar authors list include that Arabic words that come into Pashto with their own meaning keep their Arabic spelling, and that Arabic letters are not used in native Pashto words. [6] A Peshawar University writer argued in the Academy's journal Pashto in 2023 that the problems of the script have one solution, applying the seventeen decisions. [8] The researcher Zalmai Hewadmal answered that the decisions have technical difficulties, and that experts from Afghanistan, Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan should consider them again. [6]

The talk continued. At a two-day workshop at the Academy at the end of December 2016, some forty delegates asked for an easier script for ordinary readers and a nine-member committee was named. Dr Yousaf Jazab told the meeting that the script had many shortcomings and no place for semivowels, and delegates asked for a central language authority. [13] The Nangarhar authors give the same workshop to 28 and 29 December, and add a seminar of 17 and 18 May 2022 meant to announce the Academy's Bara Gali spelling officially. [6]

What still differs

The World Wide Web Consortium's note on the Pashto script says the orthography is "standardised slightly differently by Afghan and Peshawar authorities, but with only a small number of divergences". [12] Four show to any reader.

• The final unstressed ə is written ۀ in Peshawar and ه elsewhere. [12]

• The letter g is ګ in Pakistan and گ in Afghanistan. [12]

• Writers in Pakistan often use the Urdu ے for a final -i̯, where the usual letter is ی. [12]

• Compound nouns are written as single words in Afghanistan, while Peshawar keeps the parts apart without a space. [12]

The ye letters are the hardest part for a learner. The sound e is always ې. Two final endings are both said əi̯ and differ in grammar: ۍ marks a feminine noun, as in هګۍ, "egg", and ئ marks a second person plural verb, as in يئ. [12]

Tegey and Robson put the shortcoming plainly: Pashto "is not standardized in the way that English or most of the European languages are", and writers vary in spelling, punctuation and even the spaces between words. [7] They blame limited literacy and the lack of a long grammatical tradition, and add that newspapers are often written by non-native speakers or translated from Dari or Urdu. [7] The Pashto press is in Pashto media.

In Afghanistan the work goes on. In 2008 the Education Ministry, Kabul University and the Academy of Sciences settled spelling questions for the school curriculum. [6] On 23 August 2026 the Ministry of Information and Culture opened a five-day workshop at the National Museum on "Correction and Unification of Pashto and Dari Writing Systems", with Kabul University teachers, an Education Ministry curriculum director, the scholar Mohammad Masoom Hotak and representatives of the Afghanistan Academy of Sciences. [19]

Official language and the classroom

Article 3 of the Afghan constitution of 1964 reads: "From amongst the languages of Afghanistan, Pushtu and Dari shall be the official languages." [1] Article 35 made it the duty of the state to prepare an effective programme for the development of "the national language, Pushtu". [1] The constitution of 2004 names Pashto and Dari the official languages, with Uzbek, Turkmen, Baluchi, Pachaie, Nuristani or Pamiri a third official language where most people speak it. [2] Mohammad Zahir Shah governed under the 1964 text. The older step was the decree of 1936. [10]

Before the Soviet occupation, Tegey and Robson write, Dari-speaking children had to study Pashto in public schools and Dari-speaking officials had to take Pashto classes, but little changed: educated Pashtuns spoke Dari while few Dari speakers spoke Pashto. [7]

In Pakistan the constitution makes Urdu the national language and allows a provincial assembly, "without prejudice to the status of the National language", to prescribe by law measures for teaching and using a provincial language. [3] In the 1990s, Tegey and Robson say, Pashto had no official status and educated Pathans were taught in Urdu or English. [7] Khyber Pakhtunkhwa's cabinet approved Pashto as a compulsory subject up to the sixth grade on 21 March 2011. [15] A Dawn survey in May 2012 found private schools that said they had never heard of the order. [16] Dawn reported in March 2017 that the education department, after five years' delay, would teach Pashto, Hindko, Seraiki, Khowar and Kohistani from grade one under the provincial regional languages act of 2012. [17] A Nowshera education office ordered in January 2026 that Pashto be taught from the primary classes to the second year of intermediate. [18]

Words from Arabic, Persian and Pashto

The arguments among Pashtun writers have moved from letters to words. Penzl wrote that among Arabic and Persian loanwords a close pronunciation of the written form "seems to enjoy a high prestige". [4] The Nangarhar authors would leave common Arabic words such as "book" and "pen" as they are, give Arabic plurals such as "rights" the Pashto plural, and accept dialect forms where they agree with a rule, as English accepts "centre" and "center". [6]

On new words they report two views. Najib Manali's is that forcing replacements for borrowed words Pashto has already taken may not help the language. The other asks scholars to coin Pashto words for terms still borrowed from English, such as "email", "stadium", "referee" and "website", and offers ghabargun for "reaction", pachun for "rise" and taglarah for "programme" as good coinages. [6] Mohammad Masoom Hotak is quoted as saying that the task is to decide on signs for Pashto's sounds, not on pronunciation, and that changing the spelling would make more problems than it solves. [6]

Spoken Pashto

Penzl asked in 1959 whether a spoken standard matches the written one. Only in part, he found: speakers avoid extreme pronunciations that would make communication hard, and in formal speech try to say the Arabic and Persian sounds the spelling shows. [4] He found Khost speech saying plost for "father", where the standard has plar, an extreme type he called not acceptable. [4] No spoken standard "has ever been formulated, described, or taught", he concluded, and the meetings at Kabul had rightly announced themselves as dealing only with spelling. [4] Tegey and Robson add that each Pashtun considers his own speech the normal way, though Kandahar has the highest prestige, at least among Kandaharis, and is the basis of the writing system. [7] The Kandahar dialect is described in Kandahari Pashto and the Peshawar plain's in Yusufzai Pashto.