Yusufzai Pashto: the north-eastern dialect of Peshawar

At a glance

• Yusufzai Pashto here means the hard north-eastern speech of the Peshawar valley, Mardan, Swabi, Swat, Buner, Dir and Bajaur. The Linguistic Data Consortium lists the Yusufzai, Peshawar, Mohmand and Shinwari among its speakers, and the Imperial Gazetteer of 1908 calls the speech of Dir and of Swat outside the Kohistan "the pure Yusufzai Pashtu". [7, 12]

• Its mark is two letters. ښ is said as the kh of Scottish loch and ږ as a hard g, so the language is called Pakhto, not Pashto. Three more letters change as well: څ is said s, ځ z and ژ j. [10, 12]

• At the 2017 census 97 per cent of the people of Mardan Division (Mardan and Swabi) gave Pashto as their mother tongue, and 93 per cent in Peshawar Division. [1]

• In 1990 a report on Pashto in the schools said the Pashto text books used in the settled districts of the North-West Frontier Province were written in the Yusufzai dialect. [11]

• Khushal Khan Khattak and Rahman Baba both lived in the Peshawar country. Neither wrote in the dialect as it is spoken now: Khushal's own Khattak speech was the soft southern kind, according to Caroe, and Lorimer found a construction in both poets that Peshawar speakers no longer use. [6, 8]

The name and the letters

Around Peshawar the language is Pakhto (پښتو). The middle consonant is written ښ everywhere, and here it is said as kh. [10, 12] Olaf Caroe, a British frontier official who wrote a history of the Pathans, noted that Peshawar even calls itself Pekhawar in the same speech, and he chose to write Pakhtu throughout his book "seeing that Pakhtu is the language of Peshawar". [6]

The same spelling covers the whole north-east. H. G. Raverty, a British officer who began his Pashto grammar at Peshawar in 1849 and 1850, wrote that the eastern Afghans, "the tribes of Peshawer, the Ut-mun Khel, the Yusufzis of the Sama'li, of Suwat, Panjkorah, and Buner", give the letter the sound khin, and that the western Afghans give it the softer shey. [4] Samali is Raverty's name for the plain of the Yusufzai. [4] For the people behind the name see the Yusufzai, and for the larger picture of the soft and hard speech see Pashto dialects.

Bellew, a British officer and doctor whose Pashto grammar came out in 1867, was more precise about who said what. He wrote that ښ "by the Yusufzais and eastern tribes" is pronounced hard, kkh, and "by the Khataks and western tribes" soft, ksh. [3] His example is the word for "good", ښه, which the Yusufzai say kkhah and the Khattak kshah. [3] He gave پښتو and ښادي ("joy") as two more instances. [3]

Five letters that change

The Linguistic Data Consortium's guide to Pashto, which follows Josef Elfenbein's 1997 description of the sounds, puts the Yusufzai in the north-eastern group and gives its values for five letters: ښ is x, ږ is g, څ is s, ځ is z and ژ is j, as in "jam". [12] Kandahar keeps retroflex ṣ̌ and ẓ̌ for the first two, ts and dz for the next two, and zh for the last. [12]

Tegey and Robson's A Reference Grammar of Pashto (1996) prints the correspondences with examples, and the eastern column there is the one that matches the north-east. [10] Their words, with the Pashto as the book prints it:

• پښتو, "Pashto": eastern pakhtó, western pashṭó [10]

• ښاخ, "branch": eastern khākh, western ṣ̌ākh [10]

• رښتيا, "truth": eastern rikhtyā [10]

• ږ in سپوږمۍ, "moon": eastern spogmáy, western spozhmáy [10]

• ژور, "deep": eastern jawár, western zhawár [10]

Georg Morgenstierne, the Norwegian scholar whose account is in the Encyclopaedia Iranica, saw in this a loss. In the north-eastern dialects most exposed to Indo-Aryan, "especially in the Peshawar region", Pashto has got rid of five sounds that the neighbouring languages do not have, and kept only x and z. [13] He thought the hard pronunciation of ښ was recent, since the spelling still reflects the older sound. [13] Caroe drew the opposite lesson: the Durrani liking for the soft form, he wrote, may have weighed too heavily in the discussion of which form is older. [6] The Imperial Gazetteer of 1908, compiled by British officials, went further and called the Yusufzai dialect "the classical dialect", the one in which "the earliest Pashtu works were composed". [7] The scholars do not agree, and the spelling gives no answer, because it is the same on both sides.

A word that changes shape

Raverty's grammar gives a small case of what the sounds do to a word. The pronoun "we" is written موږ. The western Afghans say mūj, and Raverty calls the form with a hard g, مونګ, "the Eastern or Peshāwerī form of the first person plural". [4] The reason is the letter ږ: it becomes g in the east and a retroflex zh in the west. [4, 12]

Bellew noticed a second effect. When ښ stands next to ک without a vowel between them, the Yusufzai and eastern Afghans say the kh first and the k after it, and the Khattak and western tribes say them the other way round. [3] The Yusufzai say kkhkal for "to draw" and kkhke for "in", and the Khattak say kkshal and kkshe. [3] The consonants have swapped places. [3]

Bellew also gave the hard g of ږ in Yusufzai speech as an ordinary letter گ in writing. "Sweet" is خوږ, which he heard as khog among the Yusufzai and wrote خوګ, against khoj in the west, and the beard is ږیره. [3]

Grammar and vocabulary

Tegey and Robson say that the dialects of Pashto have not been classified or studied to any great extent, and that speakers of the major dialects understand each other, except Pashtuns from isolated areas. [10] Herbert Penzl's grammar of 1955, the best known of the older descriptions, is a study of the dialect of Kandahar. [10] One of their points about vocabulary concerns the north-east. The Kandahar and Kabul speakers are most likely to borrow words from Persian, and the eastern dialect, spoken mostly in Pakistan, is more likely to borrow from Urdu and English. [10]

J. G. Lorimer, a British political officer who compiled a Waziri grammar in 1902, wrote it for officers who had first learnt "the Pashto of Peshawar". [8] He called Peshawar "the now standard dialect", and listed words that Waziri villagers did not know: byal, "separate", and loy, "great". [8] He noticed something else in a footnote. The construction wa … ta, a prefix and a suffix around a noun, is unknown in modern Peshawar Pashto but occurs freely in the diwan of Khushal Khan Khattak, who died in 1691, and in the works of Abdur Rahman, his younger contemporary. [8]

Two poets of the Peshawar country

Rahman Baba lived at Hazar Khwani near Peshawar. Raverty, who learnt Pashto first from Rahman's poems, wrote in 1862 that he belonged to the Ghoriah Khel clan of the Mohmand, in the Mohmand district of the province of Peshawar. [4, 5] The teacher who helped Raverty with his grammar at Peshawar came from Hashtnagar, in the Peshawar valley, and Raverty began his study with Rahman's poems. [4] The poems were copied by hand for generations, and Raverty compared about sixty manuscripts of the diwan. [5]

A couplet from Rahman Baba's diwan, printed in Raverty's grammar (page 11), uses ښاخ, "branch", the very word in Tegey and Robson's table:

د یو ونی له ښاخ پیدا کیږي په چمن کښې

هم ګلون هم خارون

Da yo wanay la ṣ̌ākh paydā keegi pa chaman kṣ̌e, ham gulūna ham khārūna

From the branch of the same tree, in the garden, both thorns and roses are born. [4]

Read at Peshawar the word for "branch" is said khākh, and read at Kandahar it is ṣ̌ākh. The spelling is one, and it serves both. [10]

Khushal Khan Khattak's case is different. He was chief of the Khattak at Akora, east of Peshawar. Caroe wrote that the main body of the Khattak, south of Kohat, speak the soft Pashto, and that the Khattak of Akora and Mardan, "round about Khushhal Khan's time, became assimilated to the Yusufzais and now speak Pakhtu". [6] Most texts of Khushal's poems, he added, were edited and lithographed in Peshawar and are therefore in Pakhtu, but Khushal's descendants affirm that his original script was in Pashtu. [6] Tegey and Robson say the Khattak of Kohat speak Kandahar Pashto and call them the tribe that "effectively established the Pashto literary tradition". [10] See Khushal Khan Khattak and Rahman Baba.

The earliest Yusufzai writer

Raverty could not find any older author among the eastern Afghans than Shaykh Mali, a chief of the Yusufzai. Mali wrote a history of the Yusufzai conquest of Swat and the neighbouring mountain country, between 816 and 828 AH (1413 to 1424), with an account of how the conquered land was measured and shared among the clans. [4] Khan Kaju, who became chief in 900 AH (1494), wrote a second account that took in Buner and the Panjkora. [4] Raverty wrote that both works were extensive but not procurable, so he knew them only by report. [4] The tribe's history is told in the Yusufzai, and the poetry in Pashto literature and oral poetry.

Where it is spoken

The north-east is wide, and the sources give it by the places they name.

• Caroe's line of division runs from the Indus south of Attock through Kohat to Thal and south of the Kurram. North-east of it, he wrote, "the hard language is spoken", the tongue of all the Peshawar tribes, of Dir, Swat, Buner and Bajaur, and of the Afridi, Orakzai, Shinwari, Bangash and Turi. [6]

• The Imperial Gazetteer names Bajaur, Swat and Buner and the Yusufzai, Bangash, Orakzai, Afridi and Mohmand. It adds that the sub-dialects of the Utman Khel, of Bajaur and of the Afridis and Orakzais "differ but little" from the Yusufzai, though each has its own accent and local words. [7]

• Dir is held mainly by the Yusufzai, and the Gazetteer gives the speech of its Pashtuns as the pure Yusufzai Pashtu. In the Panjkora Kohistan the Bashkar speak a language of their own. [7] In the Swat Kohistan the Torwal and Garhwi people do the same. [7]

• Raverty, writing in 1867, named the Samali, the plain of the Yusufzai, with Peshawar, Kohat, Bannu and the Derajat as districts where, except Dera Ghazi Khan, nine-tenths of the people spoke no other language. [4]

The census of 2017 gives numbers by division. Of the 7,399,153 people of Peshawar Division, 6,856,715 gave Pashto as their mother tongue, and 274,354 gave Hindko. [1] Of the 3,998,876 people of Mardan Division, 3,884,093 gave Pashto. [1] Malakand Division, which includes Swat, Dir, Buner, Shangla and Chitral, had 7,512,607 people and 6,739,043 Pashto speakers. [1] The division includes Chitral, and the Gazetteer places Torwali and Garhwi speakers in the Swat Kohistan, so the share there is lower than in the plains. [7] Bajaur and the other districts that were once tribal agencies are not in that table.

The language of Pashto print, radio and film in Pakistan

Tegey and Robson wrote that, because of the British presence in the North-West Frontier Province, more Pashto books were published in Peshawar than in Afghanistan. [10] The printing press itself reached Peshawar early enough for Biddulph to write in 1890 that the demand for printed copies of the old poems was recent. [9] A Pashto Academy opened at Peshawar in the 1950s to develop the Pashto spoken in Pakistan, to publish research and to translate, and its later publications have followed the spelling recommendations of the Kabul academy. [10] Tariq Rahman, a Pakistani scholar of language, writing about the 1980s, says the Pashto Academy of Peshawar University used Urdu, English and Perso-Arabic roots in its work on the language, and that most Pakhtuns opposed giving up the distinctive letters of the alphabet. [11]

Text books name the dialect. Rahman quotes a 1990 study of Pashto in the tribal agencies, which gave one reason why Urdu was the language of instruction in South Waziristan: the Pashto text books in use in the settled areas of the province "are written in the Yusufzai dialect, which is not the dialect in use in the Agency". [11]

Radio came to Peshawar early. The Pakistan Broadcasting Corporation's own chronology says the provincial government set up a 250-watt transmitter at Peshawar in January 1935, and that a station was inaugurated there on 16 July 1936. [2] The regional director said in 2017 that Radio Peshawar relayed shows in Pashto, Hindko, Chitrali and Persian. [14] The singer Khial Mohammad said he sang his first song on it in 1958 and was paid 15 rupees. [14]

The first Pashto film, Laila Majnoon, opened at Peshawar's Imperial Talkies in 1941, and Dawn's review of Haji Muhammad Aslam Khan's history of Pashto cinema says it did not do as well as hoped because the Peshawar audience was mostly Hindko-speaking. [15] The Pashto film industry as Pakistan knew it began with Yousaf Khan Sherbano in December 1970. [15] More on the papers and the stations is in Pashto radio, television and press and Pashto cinema and drama.

Not one prestige

Every dialect has its own opinion of the others. Tegey and Robson wrote that each Pashtun considers his own to be the normal way to speak, that Kandahar has the most prestige, "at least among the Kandaharis", and that it is the basis of the writing system. [10] They quote the nineteenth-century Lorimer on the point: an Afridi or Shinwari phrase "will incur the contempt of the Peshawar Munshi", while to the countryman the Munshi's speech "will seem foreign, womanish, and mincing". [10] Standard written Pashto in Afghanistan follows Kandahar, and in Pakistan the spelling standard is not always followed; writers often use the Urdu forms of letters that do not keep Pashto's five forms of ye apart. [12]

The alphabet is described in the Pashto alphabet and grammar, and the geography of the dialects in the Pashto language and its dialect variation.