Pashto

Pashto (also Pakhto, Pashto, Pashtu or Afghani) is an Indo-Iranian language spoken in Afghanistan and Pakistan is spoken. It is one of the two official languages ​​in Afghanistan, where, depending on the source, spoken by 35 to 60% of the population [4] . It is the largest language of Afghanistan after the Dari (like the Persian named in Afghanistan), the other official language of Afghanistan [4] . Estimates of the number of speakers vary: some 14 million according to Andrew Dalby [5], 17 million according to the UCLA Language Materials Project [6] , 25-30 million according Omniglot [7] and 49.53 million according to Ethnologue [8] .

Literature in Pashto since the sixteenth century recorded in manuscript form. Pashto was only in the course of the twentieth century a language of education and the press. In 1933, it replaced the Dari variant of Persian as the language of government. Currently, both Dari and Pashto official languages ​​in Afghanistan [7] [4] . Pashto used the Persian version of the Arabic script, with some added symbols. Pashto borrowed much of Persian, Urdu and Punjabi . [5]

Speakers of Pashto are roughly equally divided between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Andrew Dalby distinguishes three dialect groups: The dialects of Kandahar and Peshawar are the basis of the two standard forms of written Pashto. [5]
 * the southwestern group (including Kandahar )
 * the southeast (in Balochistan ) and
 * the Northeast (including Peshawar ).

Ethnologue and Glottolog also distinguish three dialect groups [9] :
 * Central dialect group in Pakistan with just over 7.9 million speakers [10] ,
 * the southern dialect group with 1.36 million speakers in Pakistan and 2.68 million speakers in total (Balochistan and Quetta in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Tadzjiekistan, the United Arab Emirates) [11] ,
 * the northern dialect group with 9.59 million speakers in Pakistan and 9.72 million speakers in total (including in Afghanistan, India and the United Arab Emirates) [8] .