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Pashto linguistic data

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Common questions about Pashto

What linguistic data does this Pashto page show?
Word order, tone, gender count, case marking, adposition direction, syllable structure, consonant inventory traits (retroflex stops), vowel system, morphological alignment, script, register stratification, speaker count, and geographic area. Each row is one feature with Pashto's value visible; you can add other languages to read the same feature side by side.
Where do the Pashto data points come from?
Typological features are merged from URIEL+ (Mortensen et al.) and a curated set authored against descriptive grammars. Speaker counts come from Ethnologue and Glottolog. Geographic area is computed from the Asher 2007 world language atlas. Similarity scores combine genetic distance, typological overlap, and lexical-borrowing data.
Why is Pashto split-ergative when most Iranian languages are not?
Split ergativity is widespread in the Indo-Aryan languages of South Asia (Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi, Marathi). Pashto borrowed the pattern through millennia of close contact with neighboring Indo-Aryan speakers. Like in Indo-Aryan, the split appears in past-tense transitive verbs: the subject takes a marked form, and the verb agrees with the object.
What dialects does Pashto have?
The major split is between the Northeastern (Yusufzai, around Peshawar) and Southwestern (Kandahari) dialects. They differ in pronunciation of the dorsal-fricative letters (a hard /x/ vs /ʂ/ vs /ç/ depending on dialect), and in some lexical choices. Mutual intelligibility is high, with accent adjustment.
Why does Pashto cluster with Persian on similarity scores?
Both are Iranian languages with shared Indo-Iranian ancestry, similar SOV typology, and a chunk of cognate vocabulary at the basic-word level. They diverge sharply on phonology (Pashto's retroflexes, Persian's lack of them), morphology (Pashto keeps more inflection), and ergativity. The factor breakdown chip on the row tells you which dimensions contributed most.

Sources for Pashto

The grammatical descriptions on this page are informed by the following published reference and descriptive grammars. Grammatical facts themselves are not subject to copyright; the scholars who documented them deserve attribution.

  1. David, Anne Boyle (2014). Descriptive Grammar of Pashto and its Dialects. Mouton de Gruyter.
  2. Tegey, Habibullah & Barbara Robson (1996). A Reference Grammar of Pashto. Center for Applied Linguistics.
  3. Roberts, Taylor (2000). "Split-agreement and ergativity in Pashto." Kurdica 5(3).
  4. Penzl, Herbert (1955). A Grammar of Pashto: A Descriptive Study of the Dialect of Kandahar, Afghanistan. American Council of Learned Societies.
  5. LingDocs Pashto Grammar. https://grammar.lingdocs.com/
  6. Farooq, Muhammad. "Pashto Language: Solving the Mysteries of the Past Tense." https://static1.squarespace.com/static/54cb2e66e4b049ee78a97b14/

See all data sources and dataset-level citations for the broader bibliography.

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