Pashto Script

Pashto language is spoken in Afghanistan and north western parts of modern Pakistan. It is written in Arabic script that is written from right to left, along with Arabic, Persian/Dari, Urdu, Balochi, Kurdish, Kashmiri, Lahnda, Sindhi, Uyghur, Berber languages, Moplah (Dialect of Malayalam), Malagasy and Sulu^[1]. Like Arabic and Persian and unlike Urdu vowels are marked only sporadically only to indicate pronunciation, otherwise they are omitted.

Pashtuns living in Afghanistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province of Pakistan have many different dialacts but have a unified script. According to Professor Rajwali Shah Khattak; “A unified script was evolved in 1990 at the week-long Bara Gale seminar in which Afghan linguists had also participated. For written expression and media purposes, scholars recommend only this script of 43 letters”. ^[2]

Like languages written in Arabic script, Pashto also has additional sounds that are unique to the language and these are presented by a derived form to the already existing Arabic letters. It uses almost all the letters used in Arabic language and adds 15 more to it, 3 of which are shared with Farsi language, these are پ چ ژ.

The letters additional to Arabic ټ ښ ځ څ ڼ ګ ډ ړ ژ ږ ﺉ ې ۍ are derived from arabic letters but dots or ring (pandak) is added to the already existing Arabic letters. For example Pashto letter ښ (sẖeen or scheen) is derived from the Arabic letter س (seen) and one dot is place above and another below the skeleton of the letter س.

• Retroflex consonants written with “pandak” (ring): ټ ڼ ډ ړ
• Velar fricatives: gey ږ and sẖeen or scheen ښ
• Dental affricates: dz ځ and ts څ

ګ which is equivalent to Persian گ is not a retroflex consonant but is written with pandak. It has been written in both forms in the past but in modern times ګ can be identified as the Pashto Gaf.

Pashto Alphabet

Pashto alphabet is the Pashto script codified for writing Pashto language. It has 44 letters shown in the following table. The order shown in this table is important. You'll find different sorting order or arrangement of these letters in different books but the following order is the one that has been used by Afghan Ministry of Communications for Afghan keyboard standards.

Pashto Letters & Unicode

The following table shows the complete list of Pashto letters in correct alphabetical order. The list also includes letters of Arabic and Farsi languages, so that correct sorting order of all the letters could be identified if a list or a document contains words of all three languages, which is common in Islamic books written in Pashto.

Letters that are marked red are part of the Pashto alifba or alphabet.

Pashto Numberals

Pashto uses a variant of Eastern Arabic numeral system. The difference between The Eastern Arabic numeral system or generally called Arabic numeral in Middle East and the Afghan or Pashto numeral is in the numbers 4, 5 & 6. The first table contains all the numbers from 0-9 (and 10) with their names in Pashto language and the second table is for the comparison of Arabic and Pashto numberals.

References

1. ↑ A Profile of Arabic Languages by Basis Technology
2. ↑ Dawn News
3. ↑ Pashto Romanization
4. ↑ Unicode Arabic Chart
5. ↑ Pashto Alifba by Said Marjan Zazai (Afghan Wiki)
6. ↑ Unicode Arabic Chart