Pashto language

Pashto (پښتو ) is an Indo-European language spoken primarily in Afghanistan and northwestern Pakistan. Pashto belongs to the Eastern Iranian branch of the Indo-Iranian language family. Pashto is spoken by approximately 30-40 million people. It is an official and national language of Afghanistan.

In Pakistan, Pashto is spoken by about 27 million people in the North-West Frontier Province, Federally Administered Tribal Areas, and the Balochistan region. Modern "transplant" communities are also found in Sindh (Karachi and Hyderabad). Other communities of Pashto speakers are in northeastern Iran and Tajikistan. There are also Pashtun communities in Uttar Pradesh and Jammu & Kashmir in India.
Pashto-speaking communities also exist in the Middle East, especially in the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, and also in the United States, United Kingdom, Thailand, Canada, and Australia.

Pashto is one of the two official languages of Afghanistan (the other being Persian) used for the administration of the government. Pashto is also used in education, literature, office and court business, media, and in religious institutions, etc. It is an integral part of the cultural and social heritage of Afghanistan.

Pashto uses the Pashto alphabet, a modified form of the Arabic alphabet with extra letters added for Pashto-specific sounds. Pashto has been primarily written in the Naskh Arabic script, rather than the Nasta'liq script used for neighboring Persian and Urdu languages. The Pashto alphabet consists of 46 letters and 4 diacritic marks.

In Pashto, many words have their roots in Eastern Iranian languages such as Avestan, Ossetic, and Pamir languages. However, a remarkably large number of words is special to Pashto. Post 7th century borrowings came primarily from Arabic. Modern borrowings come from Persian and Hindi/Urdu, and the modern educated speech has borrowed words from English, French, and German. Many words of the scientific vocabulary come from the Persian Arabic tradition.

Pashto is a subjct-object-verb language. Adjectives come before nouns. Nouns and adjectives are inflected for two genders, masculine and feminine, two numbers, singular and pluaral, and four cases (direct, oblique I, oblique II, and vocative). The verb system has the following tenses: present, subjunctive, simple past, past progressive, present perfect and past perfect. In the past tenses, Pashto is an ergative language, i.e., transitive verbs in any of the past tenses agree with the object of the sentence.

Information: Wikipedia