Language fact file: Pashto

Pashto is spoken as a native language in: Afghanistan, Pakistan

Number of native speakers: 45-55 million (according to UNESCO – official statistics can vary)

Learn some: Impress native speakers you are introduced to by saying ‘خوښال شوم په ليدو دی’ (khushala shum pa li do di), which means ‘pleased to meet you’.

Fast facts:

Pashto has a very rich tradition of oral folk poetry, going back thousands of years. This includes a type of poem called a landay, which is a short, spoken poem created by Pashtun women. These now serve as a record of Afghan women’s everyday lives, passed down through generations.

Although Pashto uses the Arabic script, it is very different and has added some of its own characters. To a non-speaker of either language, they look identical!

The language’s vocabulary and grammatical structures tell the story of the Pashtun people’s contact with other cultures and nations of the ancient world, including varieties of ancient Greek, Saka, Parthian, Persian and some northwestern Indian languages, especially the Prakrits, Balochi, and Sindhi.