ABSTRACT
Long recognised as the most important language of the North-West Frontier Province of British India, now Pakistan, where it is spoken by 90 per cent of the population, Pashto was by royal decree of 1936 also declared to be the national language of Afghanistan in place of ‘Dari’ Persian. This official preeminence was artificial, however, and it now shares the honour with Persian. The areas of Afghanistan to which Pashto is native are those in the east, south and south-west, bordering on Pakistan, but in recent years Pashto speakers have also settled in parts of the northern and eastern provinces of the country. Reliable census figures of the number of speakers are only available from Pakistan. There, in the fifties, the total number of Pashto speakers was stated to be nearly 5.35 million, of whom 4.84 million (4.47 million of them in the North-West Frontier Province and 270,000 in Baluchistan) claimed it as their mother tongue. In Afghanistan in the same period semi-official estimates gave the number of speakers (presumably including those for whom it was a second language) as between 50 and 60 per cent of the total population of 13 million, i.e. between 6.5 and 7.8 million. Even allowing for some nationalistically inspired exaggeration in these figures, it seems permissible to assume that today at the very least 10 million people in Afghanistan and Pakistan are native speakers of Pashto. In terms of numbers it is, therefore, the second most important of modern Iranian languages.
