Pashto alphabet

The Pashto alphabet (پښتو الفبې) is the right-to-left abjad-based alphabet developed from the Arabic script, used for the Pashto language in Pakistan and Afghanistan. It originated in the 16th century through the works of Pir Roshan.

Form


Pashto is written in the Arabic Naskh. Pashto uses all 28 letters of the Arabic alphabet, and shares 3 letters ( چ, پ , and ژ ) with Persian in the additional letters.

Differences from Persian alphabet
Pashto has several letters which do not appear in any other Perso-Arabic scripts, which are shown in the table below:

All the additional characters are derived from existing Arabic letters by adding diacritics; for example, the consonants x̌īn/ṣ̌īn and ǵe/ẓ̌e look like Arabic's sīn and re respectively with a dot above and beneath. Similarly, the letters representing retroflex consonants are written with a small circle (known as a "panḍak", "ğaṛwanday" or "skəṇay") attached underneath the corresponding dental consonants.

The consonant is written as either ګ or گ.

In addition to Persian vowels, Pashto has ئ, ې , ۀ , and ۍ for additional vowels and diphthongs.

Stress
Pashto employs stress: this can change the aspect of the verb and the meaning of the word. The Arabic alphabet does not show stress placement, but in transliteration it is indicated by the use of acute accent diactric: ´ over the vowel.

Example

Letters
Pashto has 45 letters and 4 diacritic marks. The Southern (S), Northeastern (NE) and Northwestern (NW) dialects of Pashto are included.

Historical letters
The superscribed element of the letter ځ in earlier varieties was not hamza-shaped, but was very similar to little kāf of the letter ك. Such shape of the upper element of the letter is hard to find in modern fonts.

Since the time of Bayazid Pir Roshan, ڊ (dāl with subscript dot) was used for, which was still used in the Diwan of Mirza written in 1690 CE, but this sign was later replaced by ځ.

Another rare glyph for is ج࣪֗, a ج with the same dot about harakat.

Diacritic marks
The four diacritic marks are used:

Notes
 * The diacritic marks are not considered separate letters. Their use is optional and are usually not written; they are only occasionally used to distinguish between two words which would otherwise appear similar, like the words ملا - back (body part) and مُلا - Mullah.
 * In Arabic loanwords, the tanwin fatha ( ً ) can be used, e.g. مَثَلاً – masalan, "for example".

"Ye" letters


Notes
 * In Afghan orthography, this letter has ی shape, while in Peshawari orthography, its shape is ے . If the letter follows a consonant in a word, it indicates the word is masculine singular and in the direct case. At the end of verbs it is used to form verbal participle in the masculine.
 * If ۍ  ends a word it always indicates that the word it occurs in is feminine.
 * If ئ occurs at the end of a verb, it indicates the verb is in second person plural form.
 * If ې appears at end of nouns and adjectives  it indicates that those are feminine. At the end of verbs it is used as verbal suffix and to form verbal participle in the feminine. It also ends certain circumpositions.
 * If ي  occurs at the end of a verb, it indicates the verb is in third person plural present form. At the end of nouns and adjectives it indicates that the word is masculine in the singular oblique case, plural direct case. It also used in the non-declining adjective class.

Orthography differences
There are broadly two standards for Pashto orthography, the Afghan orthography, which is regulated by the Academy of Sciences of Afghanistan, and the Peshawar orthography of the Pashto Academy in Peshawar. They used to be very similar in the past, until the orthography reforms were introduced in 1970s and 80s in Afghanistan. Both of them use additional letters:. The Afghan standard is currently dominant due to the lack and negative treatment of Pashto education in Pakistan. Most writers use mixed orthography combining elements of both standards. In Pakistan, Pashto speakers who are not literate in their mother tongue often use Urdu  alphabets.

The main differences between the two are as follows:

Word-final -y sound is denoted by letter in Pakistan and dotless  letter in Afghanistan. Word-final -i sound is denoted by letter in both Pakistan and Afghanistan. Pre-reform Afghan orthography used for both cases, and some writers still often confuse them.
 * Also pronounced dəy in some dialects, and thus written or, chiefly in Afghanistan.

Word-final -a sound is denoted by in Peshawar orthography, while the -ə sound is denoted by. Afghan orthography uses for both sounds.

The letters and  for g are considered variants of the same character. Both are widely used, but the Afghan official materials prefer the form, while the Pakistani orthography sets a specific glyph for  which looks like  with a circle below. Most Arabic script fonts, however, only implement a form of ګ that looks like with a circle.

Both standards prescribe the usage of for k. In practice, however, even the official sources often use the form. Historically, the two are calligraphic variants of the same character, is more common in modern Arabic, and  is more common in Persian and Urdu. In Unicode they are split into two separate glyphs.

The y- sound before a -letter is written as in the Pakistani orthography and as  in the Afghan orthography. Pre-reform Afghan orthography also used.
 * Also yāst in Southern Pashto.

Pakistani orthography uses for the postposition kx̌e "in". Afghan standard prefers. In most dialects, this postposition is pronounced ke or ki, but the historical pronunciation, also found as a variant in some Southern Pashto dialects, is kṣ̌e. The verbal prefix (as in  kenastəl or kṣ̌enastəl "to sit down") is still pronounced kṣ̌e- in Southern Pashto and ke- in Northern Pashto, but some Afghan authors may also spell it like. On the other hand, words with combination, like  nәxṣ̌a "mark, sign",  bәxṣ̌әl "forgive, pardon", are written identically according to both standards, but some authors speaking Northern Pashto may write them according to their pronunciation:  nәxa,  bәxәl.

In some auxiliary words like pronouns and particles, as well as in plural and oblique singular forms of feminine nouns, the Pakistani orthography uses, while the Afghan orthography often uses. It reflects the pronunciation of unstressed word-final -e in some Afghan dialects, particularly the Kandahari accent. Note also that the pronoun "you" is usually written tāso in Pakistan, reflecting the local dialects. In Afghanistan, this pronoun is written tāsi or  tāso. In verbal prefixes like pre-,  kṣ̌e-/ke-, both standards use.

The auxiliary verb in passive constructions is often written without a space with the copula in the Afghan orthography. E.g., likәle šәwe da "is (fem.) written" may be spelled  by some authors.

The potential/optative participles are written with -āy in Afghanistan (e.g.  likəlāy "able to write"), and with  -ay in Pakistan ( likəlay). These participles are pronounced with -āy in Southern Pashto of Kandahar, but even the Kabuli writers who pronounce them with -ay use -āy to distinguish them from the past participles (\ likəlay "written").

In both modern orthographies, matres lectionis ( for o and u, for i) should always be written in native Pashto words. Words like tәruǵmәy "darkness, dark night",  wrusta "after, behind" etc used to be and still sometimes are written as  and. The borrowed words should be written the way they were in the original languages: bulbul "nightingale",  or  gul "flower".

The phrase pә xayr "welcome", lit. "well, successfully" is written in two words in Afghanistan, but often as a single word in Pakistan.

The Afghan orthography does not use a space in compound and suffixed words, while in Peshawar standard the letters should be disconnected without a space. The zero-width non-joiner is used in such cases.

The archaic orthography may also be used in certain texts, before standardisation.
 * In different dialects, "we" and its derivatives are pronounced mung or  mug/muẓ̌. Both types are found in Pakistan and Afghanistan, but the Afghan tradition prefers  after the Kandahari pronunciation.

Peshawar and Afghan standards also differ in the way they spell Western loanwords. Afghan spellings are influenced by Persian/Dari orthography, and through it often borrows French and German forms of the words, while Pakistani orthography is influenced by Urdu spellings of English words.

History
In the 16th century, Bayazid Pir Roshan from Waziristan Pakhtunkhwa invented the Roshani script to write Pashto. It had 41 letters:

28 of his letters came from the Arabic alphabet. He introduced 13 new letters into the Pashto alphabet. Most of the new letters he introduced i.e. ګ ,ښ ,ړ ,ډ ,څ ,ټ and ڼ are still written in the same form and are pronounced almost in the same way in modern Pashto. The sound system of the southern dialect of modern Pashto preserves the distinction between all the consonant phonemes of his orthography.

Pir Roshan also introduced the letter ږ (rē with dot below and dot above) to represent, like the ⟨s⟩ in pleasure, for which modern Pashto uses ژ instead. Modern Pashto uses the letter ږ to represent the sound (northern dialect: ), but for that sound, Pir Roshan used a letter looking like ·د (dāl with central dot). His letter ڊ (dāl with dot below) to represent has been replaced by ځ in modern Pashto. He also used ڛ (sīn with three dots below), an obsolete letter from the medieval Nastaʿlīq script, to denote the letter س (representing ) only in the isolated form. The Arabic ligature ﻻ (lām-alif) was also used. Two of his letters, پ and چ, were borrowed from the Persian alphabet.

Romanisation
The following table (read from left to right) gives the letters' isolated forms, along with possible Latin equivalents and typical IPA values:

Dialect vowels
Waziristani has the following vowels: These can potentially be romanised as: In the Marwat dialect and in the Karlāṇi dialects presence of nasalised vowels has been noted. As such the nasalised vowels be transcribed in the following ways: It can also be transcribed as:

Pashto Keyboards

 * Pashto Roman Keyboard for macOS [Guide: download; Installation Guide
 * Pashto phonetic keyboard online