Pashto

No, but they're cousins — both Indo-Iranian, but different branches. Pashto is Eastern Iranian; Persian is Western Iranian. The two have been in long contact, share some vocabulary, and use related scripts, but the grammar diverges on several points: Pashto has gender agreement, ergative past, and retroflex consonants that Persian doesn't have. Speakers of one need study to follow the other.

Retroflex consonants (ṭ, ḍ, ṛ, ṇ) are common in Indic languages but rare in Iranian — Pashto is the major exception. Pashto also has voiceless retroflex fricatives (ṣ̌) and a richer affricate set than Persian. The phonology shows clear contact influence from neighbouring Indic languages over thousands of years of geographic adjacency.

Across southern and eastern Afghanistan and the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan provinces of Pakistan. The historical Pashtun homeland straddles the Durand Line, the British-drawn border that splits the Pashtun-speaking population between two countries. Major cities with Pashto majorities include Kandahar, Jalalabad, and Peshawar.

Yes, two: masculine and feminine. Verbs, adjectives, and some prepositions agree. Pashto also has a split-ergative past tense system: in past transitive sentences, the subject takes a different form and the verb agrees with the object. This pattern shows up across the Indo-Aryan and Eastern Iranian languages of the region.

A modified Perso-Arabic abjad written right-to-left, extended with several letters for sounds Persian and Arabic don't have — the retroflex consonants (ټ, ډ, ړ, ڼ, ښ, ږ) get distinctive forms. Two main written standards exist: a Kandahari southern variety and a Peshawari northern variety, with some letter and pronunciation differences.