Pashto (پښتو; also known as Afghan, Pushto, Pashto, Pashtoe, Pashtu, and Pukhto) is the language spoken by the ethnic Afghan otherwise known as the Pashtun people who inhabit Afghanistan and the Western provinces of Pakistan.
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.
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.
Pushto is one of the national languages of Afghanistan (Dari Persian is the other), and the home language of Pushtuns living in the Northwest Frontier Province of Pakistan, and many Pushtuns living in Baluchistan (Iran and Pakistan).
In Afghanistan, Pushto is second in prestige to Dari, the Persian dialect spoken natively in the north and west.
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.
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