Pashto dialects

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Pashto dialects (Pashto: د پښتو ګړدودونه‎ da Pax̌to gəṛdoduna) are divided into two varieties: Northern Pashto (Pakhto) and Southern Pashto (Pashto). Northern Pashto is spoken in eastern and northeastern Afghanistan (including Kabul), and central, northern and eastern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (including Peshawar); while Southern Pashto is spoken to the south of it, in southern and western Afghanistan (including Kandahar), southern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and northern Balochistan (including Quetta). Each of the two varieties of Pashto is further divided into a number of dialects. Ethnologue divides Pashto into Northern, Southern and Central Pashto, and Wanetsi.^[1]

Overview

In the medieval era, a consonant shift took place in the northern parts of Pashtunistan in several phases. This change gave rise to the Northern Pashto dialect, or the hard Pax̌to. The Southern Pashto dialect, or the soft Paṣ̌to, did not experience the consonant shift. During the shift, the retroflex fricative ṣ̌ [ʂ] changed to x̌ [ç] or to x [x], while ẓ̌ [ʐ] changed to ǵ [ʝ] or to g [g]. The shift was probably complete before the Pashto book Khayr al-Bayān was written by Bayazid Pir Roshan from Waziristan in the 16th century. According to the linguists Georg Morgenstierne and David Neil MacKenzie, after the consonant shift, the distinction between ṣ̌, ẓ̌ and x, g seems to still have been preserved in Northern Pashto in the 16th and 17th century.^[2]

Among the other Eastern Iranian languages outside Pashto, the Shughni (Khughni) and Yazgulyami branch of the Pamir languages also seem to have been affected from the ṣ̌ to x consonant shift. E.g. "meat": ɡuṣ̌t in Wakhi and γwaṣ̌a in Southern Pashto, but changes to guxt in Shughni and γwaxa in Northern Pashto.

Classification

1. Southern variety

• Durrani dialect (or Southern dialect)
• Kakar dialect (or Southeastern dialect)
• Shirani dialect
• Marwat-Bettani dialect
• Wanetsi dialect
• Southern Karlani group

• Khattak dialect
• Banuchi dialect
• Dawarwola dialect
• Masidwola dialect
• Wazirwola dialect

2. Northern variety

• Central Ghilji dialect (or Northwestern dialect)
• Northern dialect (or Eastern dialect)
• Yusufzai dialect (or Northeastern dialect)
• Northern Karlani group

• Taniwola dialect
• Khosti dialect
• Zadran dialect
• Bangash dialect
• Afridi dialect
• Khogyani dialect
• Wardak dialect

Prestige varieties

Transitional dialects

In an intermediate area of Pashtunistan, mainly Ghilji, transitional dialects or mixings are found. For example š/ṣ̌/ҳ/xəja “woman”, and špaž/ẓ̌/γ̌/g “six”.^[4]

Phonetic differences

The differences between the standard varieties of Pashto are primarily phonological, and there are simple conversion rules.^[5] The morphological differences between the standard varieties are very few and unimportant. Two of the key phonemes whose pronunciation vary between the different Pashto dialects are ښ and ږ. The southern dialect of Kandahar is considered to be the most conservative with regards to phonology. It retains the original pronunciation of these two phonemes as voiceless and voiced retroflex sibilants, respectively, and does not merge them into other phonemes unlike the northern dialects.^[6]

The dialects spoken by the tribes from the Karlani confederacy of Pashtuns are lexicologically different and very varied. Moreover, the Karlani dialects have a tendency towards a change in the pronunciation of vowels. Depending on the particular dialect, the standard Pashto [a], [ā], [o], [u] may change into [ā], [â/å/o], [ȯ/ȫ/e], [i], respectively.^[4] In the Karlani dialects of Waziristan, Bannu, and Tani (southern Khost), which follow the vowel shift to the greatest extent, these four vowels normally change into [ā], [o], [e], [i], respectively.

The nine phonemes represented in the column headings below show key phonetic differences between the dialects. Five of them are consonants written in the Pashto alphabet, and four are vowels written in the Latin script; sounds are transcribed in the IPA:

• Dialects belonging to the southern non-Karlani variety, the southern Karlani variety, the northern Karlani variety, and the northern non-Karlani variety, respectively, are color-coded.

Lexical comparison

In general, the Karlani dialects, both in southern and northern varieties, show more vocabulary differences than the non-Karlani southern and northern dialects. However, the most distinctive of the Pashto dialects is Wanetsi. Although Wanetsi follows the normal phonetic rules of the southern dialects near it, it is still greatly different from them in lexicon:

Examples of sentences showing the difference between Wanetsi and the regional standard Kandahari:^[4]

See also

• Eastern Iranian languages
• Proto-Indo-European language
• Indo-Iranian languages

References