Language Variation
There are two major dialects of Pashto: Western Pashto spoken in Afghanistan and in the capital, Kabul, and Eastern Pashto spoken in northeastern Pakistan. Most speakers of Pashto speak these two dialects. Two other dialects are also distinguished: Southern Pashto, spoken in Baluchistan (western Pakistan and eastern Iran) and in Kandahar, Afghanistan.

The variation in spelling of the language's name (Pashto, Pukhto, etc.) stems from the different pronunciations in the various dialects of the second consonant in the word; for example, it is a retroflex [sh] in the Kandahari dialect, and a palatal fricative in the Kabuli dialect. The major dialect divisions have themselves numerous variants. In general, however, one speaker of Pashto readily understands another. The Central and Southern dialects are more divergent. The Kandahari dialect is reflected in the spelling system, and is considered by some to be the "standard" for that reason.

Orthography
Pushto has been written in a variant of the Persian script (which in turn is a variant of Arabic script) since the late sixteenth century. Certain letters were modified to account for sounds specific to Pushto. Until the spelling system was standardized in the late eighteenth century, the representation of these consonants varied greatly. The Pushto alphabet, which has more vowel sounds than either Persian or Arabic, represents the vowels more extensively than either the Persian or the Arabic alphabets. With the adoption of Pushto as a national language of Afghanistan, some revisions of the spelling system have been made in the interest of clarity.

Linguistic Sketch
Pushto has a seven vowel system. There are retro flex consonants sounds pronounced with the tongue tip curled back--which were presumably borrowed from nearby Indo-Aryan languages. Unlike other Iranian languages, such as Persian, Pushto allows consonant clusters of two or three sounds at the beginning of a syllable.

Pushto distinguishes two grammatical genders as well as singular and plural. There are generally two nominal cases in Pushto, although the vocative case is still used with singular nouns. Case is marked both with suffixes and with changes in the vowel of the noun stem and stress. Verbs agree with their subjects in person, number, and grammatical gender as well as being marked for tense/aspect. Past tense transitive sentences are formed as ergative: in these, the object rather than the subject agrees with the verb, and weak pronoun objects rather than subjects are omitted if they are not emphatic.

Word order, which is very rigid, is subject-object-verb. As the language of an Islamic people, Pushto also contains a high number of borrowings from Arabic; among educated speakers, the Arabic plurals of borrowed nouns are frequently maintained.

Role in Society
In Afghanistan, Pushto is second in prestige to Dari, the Persian dialect spoken natively in the north and west. Because of the political power of the Pushtuns, however, Pushto has been a required subject in Dari medium schools, and as an official language has been one of the languages of the government. For practical purposes, however, Dari is the language of business and higher education, and so Pushtuns learn Dari.

Pushto has an extensive written tradition. There are a number of classic Pushtun poets, most notably Khosal Khan Khattak. Modern Pushtun written literature has adapted those modern western literary forms, like the short story, that match forms from traditional Pushto oral literature. Pushtun folk literature is the most extensively developed in the region. Besides stories set to music, Pushtun has thousands of two and four line folk poems, traditionally composed by women. These reflect the day to day life and views of Pushtun women.

History
The first written records of Pushto are believed to date from the sixteenth century and consist of an account of Shekh Mali's conquest of Swat. In the seventeenth century, Khushhal Khan Khattak, considered the national poet of Afghanistan, was writing in Pushto. In this century, there has been a rapid expansion of writing in journalism and other modern genres which has forced innovation of the language and the creation of many new words.

Traces of the history of Pushto are present in its vocabulary. While the majority of words can be traced to Pushto's roots as member of the Eastern Iranian language branch, it has also borrowed words from adjacent languages for over two thousand years. The oldest borrowed words are from Greek, and date from the Greek occupation of Bactria in third century BC. There are also a few traces of contact with Zoroastrians and Buddhists. Starting in the Islamic period, Pushto borrowed many words from Arabic and Persian. Due to its close geographic proximity to languages of the Indian sub-continent, Pushto has borrowed words from Indian languages for centuries.

Pushto has long been recognized as an important language in Afghanistan. Classical Pushto was the object of study by British soldiers and administrators in the nineteenth century and the classical grammar in use today dates from that period. In 1936, Pushto was made the national language of Afghanistan by royal decree. Today, Dari Persian and Pushto both are official national languages.

Academic Resources
Pushto is taught at very few universities in the United States and Canada. The most consistent program offered is at the Diplomatic Language Services in Arlington, Virginia.