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Language Roots

Language Use

Features of Dari and Pashto

Names

Dari and Pashto are distantly related to English.

Language and Literacy

Language Roots

The two major languages in Afghanistan are Pashto and Persian, known in Afghanistan as Dari. Both are Iranian languages. The fact that they are related is obvious even to the casual observer, although the historical connection is not very close. Persian is the principal West Iranian language and Pashto the principal East Iranian language. They may have first begun to split apart several centuries BCE The Iranian languages form one branch of the Indo-European language family that includes the Romance languages such as French and Spanish and the Germanic languages such as German and English. Pashto and Dari are, therefore, distantly related to English.

Uzbek and Turkmen, spoken by minorities in the northern areas of Afghanistan, are both Altaic languages, closely related to Turkish and the languages of the Central Asian republics that were formerly Soviet Socialist Republics. Thanks to trade links with the subcontinent, a good number of Afghans, especially from the southern part of the country, also speak and understand Urdu and Punjabi.

The similarities and differences among the languages–even the very distant relationship between English and Dari/Pashto–can be seen by comparing the numbers one through five.^* The Dari and Pashto numbers are clearly related but bear no relationship whatever to the Uzbek or Arabic numbers.

Although the languages in Afghanistan are written using adaptations of the Arabic alphabet, none is related to Arabic, which is a member of the Semitic language family, along with Hebrew, and completely different from either the Indo-European or the Altaic language families.

* The Dari, Pashto, and Arabic words are given in phonetic notation, signified by enclosure in brackets. The Uzbek numbers are transliterated from the Cyrillic alphabet.

Dari is the prestige language and lingua franca in Afghanistan.

Language Use

Dari has always been the prestige language in Afghanistan. It is the lingua franca, the language resorted to when speakers of different languages need to conduct business or otherwise communicate. However, there are different pressures favoring the use of either Dari or Farsi.

Pashto was designated a national language of Afghanistan by the Pashtuns in the various constitutions, and in the period of modernization, all non-Pashto-speaking government workers were required to learn the language. It was by no means a popular activity: those who took such Pashto classes allege that the Pashtun teachers made the language more difficult than it needed to be. Pashto was also required as a subject in elementary schools where the medium of instruction was Dari. The language served as a national symbol since it is primarily a language associated with Afghanistan, though around half its speakers live in Pakistan. Even so, Pashto has never had the status of Dari, which has a vast cultural and literary tradition.

Dari speakers are more diverse, counting Tajiks, Hazara, Farsiwan, and Aimaq among their numbers. In Afghanistan, all education above primary school is conducted in Dari, except specific Pashto language study. Pashto speakers are frequently bilingual in Dari, but Dari speakers rarely learn more than a few words of Pashto. Speakers of other languages in Afghanistan frequently pick up Dari as a matter of course, except in the totally Pashtun areas of the south. Both Dari and Pashto are spoken among Afghans in the United States, although Dari has been more prevalent in recent years.

Both Dari and Pashto are Iranian languages.

Features of Dari and Pashto

As mentioned above, while Dari and Pashto are different languages, they share common roots in the Iranian family of languages. As such, they share common letters and some words, and their word order and verb systems are similar. They are both written using the Arabic alphabet.

Sound Systems

Dari has a set of consonants quite similar to those of English. There are short and long vowels, and stress is on the last syllable of the word. Pashto has seven vowels, and generally the same consonants as Dari does, but in addition has a series of retroflex consonants: t, d, r, n, and in the Kandahar dialect sh. Retroflex consonants are made by curling the tongue backward; our English r is a retroflex.

Grammars

Both languages have a basic word order in which the direct object comes before the verb. They also have verb systems that resemble the English verb system in basic ways. Dari and Pashto verbs have two basic stems – present and past – and make a distinction between perfective and imperfective that has its echoes in the perfect tenses of English (I went to the store vs. I have gone to the store).

Dari nouns have no grammatical gender, but are marked for person and number (singular and plural). Verbs agree with the subject in person and number; there is an extensive pattern of compound verbs consisting of a noun or adjective plus an auxiliary verb, as is the case in Pashto. However, Pashto also has three separate types of verbs, each with its own set of irregular verbs. Pashto is also more complex than Dari in terms of word formation. It has several classes of masculine and feminine nouns and adjectives and complex sets of weak and strong pronouns.

Vocabulary

Dari and Pashto have many words in common, a result of both being Iranian languages and therefore having the same ancestral words and of having been spoken side by side for centuries.

Both languages have a number of words borrowed from Arabic, as do all the languages spoken by Islamic peoples. Many given names, especially men's, are Arabic. In the compound verb classes of both languages, many of the nouns that form the first part of the compound are Arabic. For example, the Pashto [harakat kaw-] 'make a move' is composed of the Arabic [harakat] 'movements', and [saber kaw-] 'bear with' from Arabic [saber] 'patience'.

As is true of all languages, the dialects of Dari and Pashto spoken in areas adjacent to other languages are likely to have more borrowed words from those languages. For example, Pashto has borrowed words from Urdu, spoken in Pakistan, and the Dari spoken in the north has borrowed words from Uzbek and Turkmen.

Writing Systems

Both languages are written in the Arabic alphabet, which reads from right to left and connects letters in cursive style. (Dari has four extra letters to represent sounds that don't occur in Arabic. Pashto has the four extra letters that Dari has, plus an additional eight.) Because the Arabic alphabet does not use symbols to represent vowels (except in the Koran), it is impossible to transliterate from Dari or Pashto to English letter by letter, and there are a number of ways to spell the vowels. In putting together this fact sheet, for example, the author encountered mujahideen, mujaheddin, mujahedin, and mujahiddeen.

Names

Afghans traditionally use only a first name. The Western notion of first name + surname is so ingrained that Afghan first names (which happen to be double names, similar to American double names such as Mary Jane or Billy Bob) are frequently interpreted as first name + surname. For example, the Western press frequently referred to Abdul Haq, the Pashtun leader who was executed by the Taliban in October 2001, as Haq, although his name was a common Arabic double name: Abd (‘slave’), -ul (the Arabic definite article), Haq (one of the names for God).

For practical reasons, Afghans who have any contact with the Western world almost always adopt a surname or have one adopted for them. Having surnames is also considered a status symbol. Those from prosperous or influential families used surnames for added recognition, whereas commoners did not. Pashtuns frequently adopt the names of their tribes as their last names: A clue to this is a last name that ends in -ai (the animate masculine singular ending in Pashto) or —i (the animate masculine plural), as, for example, Qalzai (the last name of one of the Pashtun exile commanders). Women adopt, or are assumed to have, the last names of their husbands or fathers.

Afghan male first names are frequently Arabic names, reflecting Islamic values. Fore example, any male name starting with Abd-ul- is an Arabic construction with the last word being one of the names for God, as in Abdul Haq, mentioned above. Names ending in -ullah or -allah ('Allah') and -din ('religion'), are Arabic, as in, for example, Habibullah, Atiqullah, and Jalaluddin.

Afghan girls are usually given traditional Arabic or Persian feminine names such as Laila, Nura, Jamila, and Nasrin. Pashtuns frequently give their girls names that are Pashto words for things of beauty and value – for example, Kawtara ('pigeon'), and Spogmay ('moon’).

The Cultural Orientation Project--http://www.culturalorientation.net, for more information contact sanja@cal.org
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