Pashto

Pashto, also known as Pashtu, is one of the two major languages of Afghanistan. It is spoken by about 10 million people there—about 60 percent of the population- mostly in the eastern half of the country. It is also spoken in northwestern Pakistanby about 10 million people.

Pashto is the language of the Pathans, the indigenous inhabitants of Afghanistan. Like Persian, it is one of the Iranian languages, and thus part of the Indo-European family. It is written in the Perso-Arabic script, but the alphabet contains a number of letters not to be found in either Persian or Arabic. The term "Pashto" actually refers to the more important of the two dialects- the so-called soft dialect of Afghanistan which preserves the ancient sh and zh sounds. For those parts of Pakistan where the "hard" kh and gh prevail, the language is generally referred to as Pakhto.