A national language of Afghanistan, Pashto is primarily spoken in the east, south, and southwest, but also in some northern and western parts of the country. The exact number of speakers is unavailable, but different

 ...

Some linguists have argued that Pashto is descended from Avestan or a variety very similar to it, while others have attempted to place it closer to Bactrian. However, neither position is universally agreed upon. What scholars do agree on is the fact that Pashto is an

 ...

Pashto is a subject–object–verb (SOV) language with split ergativity. In Pashto, this means that the verb agrees with the subject in transitive and intransitive sentences in non-past, non-completed clauses, but when a completed action is reported in any of the past

 ...

Vowels
Consonants
• Phonemes that have been borrowed, thus non-native to Pashto, are color coded. The phonemes /q/ and /f/ tend to be replaced by [k] and [p] respectively.
• /ɽ/ is apical postalveolar [

 ...

Pashto employs the Pashto alphabet, a modified form of the Perso-Arabic alphabet or Arabic script. In the 16th century, Bayazid Pir Roshanintroduced 13 new letters to the Pashto

 ...

Pashto dialects are divided into two categories, the "soft" southern grouping of Paṣ̌tō, and the "hard" northern grouping of Pax̌tō (Pakhtu). Each group is further divided into a number of dialcets. The Southern dialect of Tareeno is the most distinctive Pashto dialect.

 ...

In Pashto, most of the native elements of the lexicon are related to other Eastern Iranian languages. As noted by Josef Elfenbein, "Loanwords

 ...