Pashto

Pashto is an Eastern Iranian language within the Indo-European family, spoken natively across northwestern Pakistan and in southern and eastern Afghanistan. It holds the status of one of Afghanistan’s two official languages. In older Persian literature, it was sometimes called Afghani. For ethnic Pashtuns, the language is a key marker of identity, and estimates place the total number of speakers globally between 35 million and 55 million.

**Geographic distribution**

In Afghanistan, Pashto is a national language used mainly in the east, south, and southwest, though it also appears in some northern and western areas. Exact speaker counts are hard to pin down, but estimates suggest that 35–45% of the country’s population speaks it as a mother tongue.

In Pakistan, about 18.1% of the population speaks Pashto, concentrated in the northwestern province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and the northern districts of Balochistan. Pashto speakers also live in Punjab, Islamabad, and other major cities—most notably Karachi in Sindh, which may host the largest Pashtun population of any city worldwide.

Smaller Pashto-speaking communities exist in India, Tajikistan, and northeastern Iran (especially in South Khorasan Province, east of Qaen near the Afghan border). In India, most ethnic Pashtuns (often called Pathans) speak Hindi-Urdu rather than Pashto, though exceptions include the Sheen Khalai in Rajasthan and the Pathan community in Kolkata, sometimes known as Kabuliwala. Pashtun diaspora communities abroad, particularly in the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, also maintain the language.

**Afghanistan**

Alongside Dari Persian, Pashto is one of Afghanistan’s two official languages. From the early 18th century onward, the country’s monarchs were mostly ethnic Pashtuns (the exception being Habibullāh Kalakāni in 1929). Persian served as the literary language of the royal court and was more common in government, while Pashtun tribes spoke Pashto at home. King Amanullah Khan, after the Third Anglo-Afghan War in 1919, began promoting Pashto as a symbol of ethnic identity and official nationalism. In the 1930s, a push to elevate Pashto in government, administration, and the arts gained momentum: the Pashto Society (Pashto Anjuman) was founded in 1931, Kabul University opened in 1932, and the Pashto Academy (Pashto Tolana) was established in 1937. Muhammad Na'im Khan, minister of education from 1938 to 1946, formalized a policy to make Pashto the national language, leading to the creation and publication of Pashto textbooks. After the Saur Revolution in 1978, the Pashto Tolana was folded into the Academy of Sciences of Afghanistan, following a Soviet model.

Despite official support, the Afghan elite often viewed Persian as more sophisticated and cultured. King Zahir Shah (reigned 1933–1973) followed a 1933 decree by his father Nadir Khan requiring officials to study and use both Persian and Pashto. A 1936 royal decree gave Pashto full official status, allowing its use in all government and education—even though the Pashtun royal family and bureaucrats mostly spoke Persian. Pashto thus became a national language and a symbol of Pashtun nationalism. The 1964 constitutional assembly reaffirmed Pashto’s official status when Afghan Persian was officially renamed Dari. Since the Taliban’s return to power in 2021, both Dari and Pashto remain official languages, but critics say the Taliban have sidelined Persian in favor of Pashto. The Taliban-era national anthem is also in Pashto.

**Pakistan**

In British India, the 1920s saw a flowering of Pashto in the North-West Frontier Province. Bacha Khan founded the Anjuman-e Islah al-Afaghina (Society for the Reformation of Afghans) in 1921 to promote Pashto as part of Pashtun culture; its 1927 annual meeting drew around 80,000 people. In 1955, Pashtun intellectuals, including Abdul Qadir, established the Pashto Academy in Peshawar, modeled on Afghanistan’s Pashto Tolana. The University of Balochistan set up a Department of Pashto in 1974.

In Pakistan today, Pashto is the first language of roughly 18.1% of the population (according to the 2023 census). Urdu and English are the country’s two official languages, and Pashto has no federal official status. It is the regional language of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and northern Balochistan, but government schools primarily teach in Urdu. This neglect of Pashto has caused growing resentment among Pashtuns. Pashto is poorly taught in schools, and instructional materials often do not reflect the local dialect—an issue given the language’s rich dialectal variety. Researchers note that Pashtun students struggle to fully understand material delivered in Urdu.