(2006). In: Tariq Rahman.

MacKenzie, 1990, "Pashto", in Bernard Comrie, ed. The media coverage in the U.S. tends to paint it as a country full of Muslim extremists who are more or less grouped in with the rest of the countries in the Middle East where conflicts are going on. Turkmen is also a Turkic language and is the official language of Turkmenistan. It is also spoken in parts of Mianwali and Attock districts of the Punjab province, areas of Gilgit-Baltistan and in Islamabad, as well as by Pashtuns who live in different cities throughout the country. Only about 3% of the population of Afghanistan speaks Turkmen, most of whom live in the northwestern region of the country. [27], Other communities of Pashto speakers are found in India, Tajikistan,[28] and northeastern Iran (primarily in South Khorasan Province to the east of Qaen, near the Afghan border). Dari was the official, administrative, and cultural language of the empire and was used as a lingua franca throughout the Indian subcontinent for a long time even after the collapse of the empire. Mushaeras or poetry competitions are a common indulgence with the ordinary people.

Pashto is one of the two official languages of Afghanistan, along with Dari Persian. Phonemes that have been borrowed, thus non-native to Pashto, are color coded.

In fact, it is barely spoken there. Religion plays an integral role in the shaping of Afghanistan’s culture and has influenced other spheres of the country’s culture. Dari is, however, the more common of the two with up to 49% speaking it as a first language and 37% having the ability to speak it as a second language. Standard Pashto has been developed by Radio Television Afghanistan and Academy of Sciences of Afghanistan in Kabul. Ph.D. Thesis, Hamburg 1966. [60][61] Pata Khazana is a Pashto manuscript[62] claimed to be written by Mohammad Hotak under the patronage of the Pashtun emperor Hussain Hotak in Kandahar.

Pashto employs the Pashto alphabet, a modified form of the Perso-Arabic alphabet or Arabic script. "Pashto Language & Identity Formation in Pakistan.". The lyrics of the national anthem of Afghanistan are in Pashto.

An excerpt from the Kalām of Rahman Baba: زۀ رحمان پۀ خپله ګرم يم چې مين يم

Dari and Pashto are Indo-European languages related to most languages spoken in Europe, including Swedish.

[72][73] Modern speech borrows words from English, French, and German.

As a national language of Afghanistan,[20] Pashto is primarily spoken in the east, south, and southwest, but also in some northern and western parts of the country. David Neil MacKenzie: David N. Mackenzie: Emeneau, M. B. The phonemes /q/ and /f/ tend to be replaced by [k] and [p] respectively. However, this is disputed by several modern experts such as David Neil MacKenzie and Lucia Serena Loi. Pashto-speakers are found in other major cities of Pakistan, most notably in Karachi, Sindh. [36] Persian, the literary language of the royal court,[37] was more widely used in government institutions while the Pashtun tribes spoke Pashto as their native tongue. It is the other official language of Afghanistan, along with Pashto.

Actually a variety of Persian that is spoken in Afghanistan, Dari is sometimes called Dari Persian or Afghan Persian.

Alpha Omega Translations provides multilingual translation, interpretation, transcription, localization, editing, glossary development, desktop publishing and design, and writing for private and government entities. (n as in 'strange' and day as in … In fact, most homes have exclusive collections of poetry. In modern times, noticing the incursion of Persian and Arabic vocabulary, there is a strong desire to "purify" Pashto by restoring its old vocabulary.[63][64][65][66]. Poetry is a major component in education. However small numbers of Pashto speakers exist in India, namely the Sheen Khalai in Rajasthan,[30] and the Pathan community in the city of Kolkata, often nicknamed the Kabuliwala ("people of Kabul").[31][32]. Pashto is the second most common language in Pakistan as well.

[40] In 1936 a royal decree of Zahir Shah formally granted to Pashto the status of an official language[41] with full rights to usage in all aspects of government and education - despite the fact that the ethnically Pashtun royal family and bureaucrats mostly spoke Persian. Pashto is a subject–object–verb (SOV) language with split ergativity.

Uzbek uses three different writing systems: Latin, Cyrillic, and Arabic.