Some sources put the total number of native Pashto speakers in modern-day Afghanistan and Pakistan as high 18.5 million.

There’s also a set of Central Pashto dialects, Bannuchi, Waziri, and Dzadrani, which are spoken along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Northern and Southern Pashto are the two primary standards. Northern Pashto counts about 9.6 million speakers in Pakistan. These dialects are sometimes called the “hard” dialects, since they use the /gh/ and /kh/ sounds in place of the older /zh/ and /sh/ sounds. The language’s “soft” dialects, which retain the age-old /zh/ and /sh/ sounds, are known collectively as Southern Pashto-and spoken by about six million people in Afghanistan.Ĭonversely, the Northern dialects are sometimes called either Paxto or Pakhto.

The Pashto language is divided into three standards, or dialect groups. In Persian literature, it’s sometimes called “Afghani.” You might hear the Pashto language referred to as Pukhto, Pakhto, Pashtu, and Pushto. There are smaller groups of Pashto speakers in Tajikistan, as well as Iran. Pashto is native to both Pakistan and Afghanistan. It’s closely related to Farsi, Kurdish, and Balochi, among other languages.

Pashto Language Exercises, Games and Flashcards.

Online Pashto Dictionaries and Dictionary Apps.

How to Learn Pashto: Hacking the Language for English Speakers.

Pashto grammar verba