Dari

Dari (Persian)

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Dari (Afghan Persian)
دری
Dari (Persian pronunciation: [dæˈɾi]) in Perso-Arabic script (Nasta`liq style)
Spoken in	Afghanistan
Region	Central Asia, Middle East, South Asia
Total speakers	12-15 million, as first language (Tajiks 11-13 m; Hazaras 2.5-3 m; Aymāqs 3-3.5 m; Pashtuns (unknown))
Language family	Indo-European Indo-Iranian Iranian Western Iranian Southwestern Iranian Persian Dari (Afghan Persian)
Dialects	Kaboli, Mazari, Herati, Badakhshi, Panjshiri, Laghmani, Sistani, Aimaqi, Hazaragi[1]
Official status
Official language in	Afghanistan
Regulated by	Academy of Sciences of Afghanistan
Language codes
ISO 639-1	fa
ISO 639-2	per (B)	fas (T)
ISO 639-3	variously: prs – Dari, Afghan Persian aiq – Aimaq haz – Hazaragi
Linguasphere	58-AAC-ce (Dari) + 58-AAC-cdo & cdp (Hazaragi) + 58-AAC-ck (Aimaq)
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode.

Dari (Persian: دری Darī, pronounced [dæˈɾi]) or Fārsī-ye Darī (Persian: فارسی دری, [fɒːɾsije dæˈɾi]) in historical terms refers to the Persian court language of the Sassanids.^[2] In contemporary usage, the term refers to the dialects of modern Persian language spoken in Afghanistan, and hence known as Afghan Persian in some Western sources.^[3][4] It is the term officially recognized and promoted in 1964 by the Afghan government for the Persian language.^[5] As defined in the Constitution of Afghanistan, it is one of the two official languages of Afghanistan; the other is Pashto.^[6] Dari is the most widely spoken language in Afghanistan and the mother-tongue of approximately 50%^{[3][7][8][9][10]} of the population, serving as the country's lingua franca.^[8] The Iranian and Afghan dialects of Persian are highly mutually intelligible, with differences found primarily in the vocabulary and phonology.
Dari, spoken in Afghanistan, should not be confused with Dari or Gabri of Iran, a language of the Central Iranian sub-group, spoken in some Zoroastrian communities.^[11][12]

Contents [hide] 1 History and origin of the word 2 Geographical distribution 3 Cultural influence 4 Differences between Iranian and Afghan Persian 4.1 Phonology 4.2 Morphology 4.3 Syntax 4.4 Vocabulary 4.5 Dialect continuum 5 Political views on the language 6 See also 7 Further reading 8 References 9 External links

[edit] History and origin of the word

Dari is the name given to the New Persian literary language at a very early age and was widely used in Arabic (cf. Al-Estakhri, Al-Muqaddasi, and Ibn Hawqal) and Persian texts.^[5]
There are different opinions about the origin of the word Dari. The majority of scholars believe that Dari refers to the Persian word dar or darbār (دربار), meaning "Court", as it was the formal language of the Sassanids.^[5] The original meaning of the word dari is given in a notice attributed to Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ (cited by Ibn al-Nadim in Al-Fehrest).^[13] According to him, "Pārsī was the language spoken by priests, scholars, and the like; it is the language of Fars." It is obvious that this language refers to the Middle Persian.^[5] As for Dari, he says, "it is the language of the cities of Madā'en; it is spoken by those who are at the king’s court. [Its name] is connected with presence at court. Among the languages of the people of Khorasan and the east, the language of the people of Balkh is predominant.”^[5]
The literary New Persian, which was called Dari, originally developed in Khorasan and Transoxiana^[2][5] and gradually supplanted the Parthian language in Greater Iran.^[5]
Iranian^[a] languages have been and are still widely used in Central Asia both by native speakers and as trade languages. Whereas in the past, East Iranian languages, such as Bactrian, Sogdian and Khotanese, and West Iranian languages, notably Parthian and Middle Persian were prominent. New Persian (Dari) has supplanted most of these languages.
^a Note that the term Iranian as used here is a linguistic term and does not refer to the nation of Iran.

[edit] Geographical distribution

Dari, which is also simply called Farsi (Persian) by its native-speakers, is one of the two official languages of Afghanistan (the other being Pashto). In practice though, it serves as the de facto lingua franca among the various ethno-linguistic groups.
Dari is spoken by almost 50% of the population as a first language.^{[3][7][8][9][10]} Tajiks who comprise approximately 27% of the population are the primary speakers, followed by Hazaras (9%) and Aymāqs (4%). Moreover, many urbanized Pashtuns also use Dari as a first language.
Dari dominates in the northern, western and central areas of Afghanistan, and is the common language spoken in cities such as Kabul, Herat, Mazar-i-Sharif, Fayzabad, Panjshir, and Bamiyan. Smaller Dari-speaking communities also exist in southern Pashtun-dominated areas such as in the cities of Kandahar, Laghman, Gardez, Farah, and Jalalabad.

[edit] Cultural influence

Dari has contributed to the majority of Persian borrowings in other Asian languages, such as Urdu, Punjabi, Gujarati, etc., as it was the administrative, official and cultural language of the Persocentric Mughal Empire and served as the lingua franca throughout the South Asian subcontinent for centuries. The sizeable Persian component of the Anglo-Indian loan words in English and in Urdu therefore reflects the Dari pronunciation. For instance dopiaza or pyjama come from the Dari pronunciation, while in the Iranian Persian they're pronounced do-piyāzeh and pey-jāmeh. Persian lexemes and certain morphological elements ( e.g. the "ezāfe") have often been employed to coin politcal, cultural etc. concepts, items or ideas that were historically unknown outside the South Asian region, as it is the case with the aforementioned "borrowings".
The cultural dominance of Iran (especially in the media) ensures that the specific features of Iranian Persian are also understood by many Dari speakers in Afghanistan. The opposite is also true, to a point. In formal level, spoken or written, Dari is usually understood by the Persian speakers of Iran.

[edit] Differences between Iranian and Afghan Persian

[edit] Phonology

Phonetically, Dari generally resembles a more archaic form of Persian (Farsi). The differences in pronunciation of Iranian and Afghan Persian can be considerable, on par with Scottish and Cockney English, although educated speakers generally have no difficulty understanding each other (except in the use of certain lexical items or idiomatic expressions). The principal differences between standard Iranian Persian, based on the dialect of the capital Tehran, and Afghan Dari, as based on the Kabul dialect, are:

1. The merging of "majhul" vowels "ē" / "ī" and "ō" / "ū" into "ī" and "ū" respectively in Iranian Persian, whereas in Afghan Persian, they are still kept separate. For instance, the identically written words شیر 'lion' and 'milk' are pronounced the same in Iranian Persian as [šīr], but [šēr] for 'lion' and [šīr] for 'milk' in Afghan Persian. The long vowel in زود 'quick' and زور 'strong' is realized as [ū] in Iranian Persian, in contrast, these words are pronounced as [zūd] and [zōr] respectively by Persian speakers in Afghanistan.
2. The treatment of the diphthongs of early Classical Persian "aw" (as "ow" in Engl. "cow") and "ay" (as "i" in English "ice"), which are pronounced as [ow] (as in Engl. "low") and [ey] (as in English "day") in Iranian Persian. Dari, on the other hand, is more archaic, e.g. نوروز 'Persian New Year' is realized as [nowrūz] in Iranian, and [nawrōz] in Afghan Persian, and نخیر 'no' is uttered as [naχejr] in Iranian, and as [naχajr] in Afghan Persian.
3. The high short vowels "i" and "u" tend to be lowered in Iranian Persian, as "e" (similar to "i" in English "fit", "hit"), and "o" (as in British English "Ron").
4. The pronunciation of the labial consonant و, which is realized as a voiced labiodental fricative [v], but Afghan Persian still retains the (classical) bilabial pronunciation [w].
5. The convergence of voiced uvular stop [q] (ق) and voiced velar fricative [ɣ] (غ) in Iranian Persian (presumably under the influence of Turkic languages like Azeri),^[14] is still kept separate in Dari.
6. The realization of short final "a" (-ه) as [e] in Iranian Persian.
7. The realization of short non-final "a" as [æ] in Iranian Persian.

[edit] Morphology

This section is empty. You can help by adding to it.

[edit] Syntax

Basically, in Afghanistan people will not use the continuous tense in the simple present. They will only add the می (mi) as a prefix to the present stem of the verb. Example: “I am eating bread” would be: من نان می‌خورم (man nan mikhuram). On the other hand, the syntax of Dari Persian does not differ greatly from Iranian Persian. One of the major grammatical differences is expressing the continuous tense. In Iranian Persian, the auxiliary verb “to have” (داشتن [dāštan]) is placed before the main finite verb (with prefix "mī-") to indicate a continuous action. In Dari, on the other hand, a periphrastic construction with the expression "dar hāl-i" (at the moment of) is used instead: the main verb appears in the infinitive. A sentence like "I am going" would be thus expressed as "man dāram mīr(av)am" in Iran, whereas in Afghanistan this would be "man dar hāl-i raftan hastam" ("hastam" is a copula form, viz. the 1st person singular present of the verb "būdan" 'to be').

This section requires expansion.

[edit] Vocabulary

This section is empty. You can help by adding to it.

[edit] Dialect continuum

The dialects of Dari spoken in Northern, Central and Eastern Afghanistan, for example in Kabul, Mazar, and Badakhshan, have distinct features compared to Iranian Persian. However, the dialect of Dari spoken in Western Afghanistan stands in between the Afghan and Iranian Persian. For instance, the Herati dialect shares vocabulary and phonology with both Dari and Iranian Persian. Likewise, the dialect of Persian in Eastern Iran, for instance in Mashhad, is quite similar to the Herati dialect of Afghanistan.
The Kabuli dialect has become the standard dialect of Dari in Afghanistan, as has the Tehrani dialect in relation to the Persian in Iran. Since the 1940s, Radio Afghanistan has been broadcasting its Dari programs in the Kabuli dialect, which ensured the homogenization between the Kabuli dialect and other dialects of Dari spoken throughout Afghanistan. Since 2003, the media, especially the private radio and television broadcasters, have carried out their Dari programs in the Kabuli dialect.

[edit] Political views on the language

The native-speakers of Dari usually call their language Farsi. However, the term Dari has been officially promoted by the government of Afghanistan for political reasons, and enjoys equal official status alongside Pashto in Afghanistan. The local name for Persian language was officially changed from Farsi to Dari in 1964.^[15][16] In respective linguistic boundaries, Dari is the medium of education with Pashto being taught as a second language.

Pashto

Pashto
پښتو
Pronunciation	[paʂˈto], [paçˈto], [paxˈto]
Spoken in	Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran (minor) and by the Pashtun diaspora around the world.
Region	South-Central Asia
Total speakers	estimated 50 to 60 million[1][2][3][4][5]
Language family	Indo-European Indo-Iranian Iranian Eastern Iranian Northeastern[6] Pashto
Writing system	Pashto alphabet
Official status
Official language in	Afghanistan  Pakistan (provincial language in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. and FATA)
Regulated by	Academy of Sciences of Afghanistan
Language codes
ISO 639-1	ps
ISO 639-2	pus
ISO 639-3	pus – Macrolanguage individual codes: pst – Central Pashto pbu – Northern Pashto pbt – Southern Pashto
Linguasphere	58-ABD-a
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode.

Pashto (Naskh: پښتو [paʂˈto]; also transliterated Pakhto, Pushto, Pukhto, Pashtu, Paxto or Pushtu), known as Afghan in Farsi and Pathan in Punjabi ( the two languages being located on either side of Pashto),^[7] is the native language of the indigenous^[8] Pashtun people who are found primarily between an area south of the Amu Darya in Afghanistan and west of the Indus River in Pakistan. It is a member of the Eastern Iranian languages group spoken in Pakistan and Afghanistan as well as by the Pashtun diaspora around the world.^[9]
Pashto belongs to the Northeastern branch of the Indo-Iranian language family^[6][10], although Ethnologue lists it as Southeastern.^[11] The number of Pashtuns or Pashto-speakers is estimated 50-60 million people world wide.^{[2][3][3][4][5][1]} The Constitution of Afghanistan declares Pashto as one of the two official languages of the country, the other being Dari (Persian).^{[9][12][13][14]}

Contents [hide] 1 Geographic distribution 2 History 2.1 Official language of Afghanistan 2.2 Regional language in Pakistan 3 Grammar 4 Phonology 4.1 Vowels 4.2 Consonants 5 Vocabulary 6 Writing system 7 Dialects 8 See also 9 Notes and references 10 Bibliography 11 External links

[edit] Geographic distribution

Predominantly Pashto-speaking area marked in blue with lines. The southern portion without the lines is Balochistan (land of Baloch people, speakers of Balochi language).

Pashto is a language spoken in South-Central Asia, primarily in Afghanistan and neighboring Pakistan as well as by the Pashtuns throughout the world.
As the national language of Afghanistan,^[15] Pashto is primarily spoken in the east, south and southwest, but also in some northern and western parts of the country. The exact numbers of speakers are unavailable, but different estimates show that Pashto is the mother tongue of 35-60%^{[16][17][18][19]} of the total population of Afghanistan.
In Pakistan, Pashto is the first language of about 15.42%^[20] of Pakistan's 170 million people. It is the main language of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and northwestern Balochistan, but also spoken in parts of Mianwali and Attock districts of the Punjab province as well as by Pashtuns who are found living in different cities throughout the country. Modern Pashto-speaking communities are also found in the cities of Karachi and Hyderabad in Sindh.
Other communities of Pashto speakers are found in northeastern Iran, primarily in South Khorasan Province to the east of Qaen, near the Afghan border,^[21] and in Tajikistan.^[22] There are also communities of Pashtun communities descenmt in the southwestern part of Jammu and Kashmir.^[23][24][25]
Sizable Pashto-speaking communities also exist in the Middle East, especially in the United Arab Emirates,^[26] and Saudi Arabia, as well as in the United States, United Kingdom,^[26] Thailand, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, Qatar, Australia, Japan and Russia etc.

[edit] History

The Arachosia Satrapy and the Pactyan people during the Achaemenid Empire in 500 B.C.

The origin of Pashto language and the Pashtun tribes is unknown. The word "Pashto" derives by regular phonological processes from Parsawā- "Persian".^[27] Nonetheless, the Pashtuns are sometimes compared with the Pakhta tribes mentioned in the Rigveda (1700–1100 BC), apparently the same as a people called Pactyans, described by the Greek historian Herodotus as living in the Achaemenid's Arachosia Satrapy as early as the 1st millennium BC.^[28] However, this comparison appears to be due mainly to the apparent, etymologically unjustified, similarity between their names.^[29][30]
Herodotus also mentions the Pactyan "Apridai" tribe but it is unknown what language they spoke.^[31] Strabo, who lived between 64 BC and 24 CE, explains that the tribes inhabiting the lands west of the Indus River were part of Ariana and to their east was India.^[29] Since the 3rd century CE and onward, they are mostly referred to by the name "Afghan" ("Abgan")^[32][33][34] and their language as "Afghani".^[35]
Scholars such as Abdul Hai Habibi and others believe that the earliest Pashto work dates back to Amir Kror Suri in the eighth century, and they use the writings found in Pata Khazana. However, this is disputed by several European experts due to lack of strong evidence. Pata Khazana is a Pashto manuscript^[36] claimed to be first compiled during the Hotaki dynasty (1709–1738) in Kandahar, Afghanistan. During the 17th century Pashto poetry was becoming very popular among the Pashtuns. Some of those who wrote Poetry in Pashto are Khushal Khan Khattak, Rahman Baba, Nazo Tokhi and Ahmad Shah Durrani, founder of the modern state of Afghanistan or the Afghan Empire.

[edit] Official language of Afghanistan

Further information: Languages of Afghanistan

Before the present day ethno-linguistic situation in South Asia, the Afghan Empire comprised regions on both sides of the Durand Line by which the British colonial power annexed about one third of Afghanistan. The border created a buffer zone and was drawn through the Pashtun areas of settlement leaving the larger part of them in what was to become Pakistan.
Pashto (since 1936) and Dari (since 1964) are the two official languages of Afghanistan - a status held until the 1930s by Persian,^[37] which served as the lingua franca of the Durrani Empire.^[38]
Since the early 18th century, all the kings of Afghanistan were ethnic Pashtuns except for Habibullah Kalakani, and most of them bilingual although Amānullāh Khān spoke Pashto as his second language.^[39] Persian as the literary language of the royal court^[40] was more widely used in government institutions while Pashto was spoken by the Pashtun tribes as their native tongue. Amanullah Khan began promoting Pashto during his reign as a marker of ethnic identity and a symbol of "official nationalism"^[39] leading Afghanistan to independence after the defeat of the British colonial power in the Third Anglo-Afghan War. In the 1930s, a movement began to take hold to promote Pashto as a language of government, administration and art with the establishment of a Pashto Society Pashto Anjuman in 1931^[41] and the inauguration of the Kabul University in 1932 as well as the formation of the Pashto Academy Pashto Tolana in 1937.^[42] Although officially strengthening the use of Pashto, the Afghan elite regarded Persian as a "sophisticated language and a symbol of cultured upbringing".^[39] King Zahir Shah thus followed suit after his father Nadir Khan had decreed in 1933, that both Persian and Pashto were to be studied and utilized by officials.^[43] In 1936, Pashto was formally granted the status of an official language^[44] with full rights to usage in all aspects of government and education by a royal decree under Zahir Shah despite the fact that the ethnically Pashtun royal family and bureaucrates mostly spoke Persian.^[42] Thus Pashto became a national language, a symbol for Afghan nationalism.^[38]
The status of official language was reaffirmed in 1964 by the constitutional assembly when Afghan Persian was officially renamed to Dari.^[45][46] The lyrics of the national anthem of Afghanistan are in Pashto.

[edit] Regional language in Pakistan

Further information: Languages of Pakistan

In Pakistan, Pashto is the regional language of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (formerly North-West Frontier Province) and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas.^[47] In 1984, Pashto was permitted to be used as the medium of instruction in primary schools.^[39]

[edit] Grammar

Main article: Pashto grammar

Pashto is an SOV (Subject-Object-Verb) language with split ergativity. Adjectives come before nouns. Nouns and adjectives are inflected for two genders (masc./fem.),^[48] two numbers (sing./plur.), and four cases (direct, oblique I, oblique II and vocative). The verb system is very intricate with the following tenses: present, simple past, past progressive, present perfect and past perfect. There is also an inflection for the subjunctive mood.In any of the past tenses (simple past, past progressive, present perfect and past perfect), Pashto is an ergative language; i.e., transitive verbs in any of the past tenses agree with the object of the sentence.

[edit] Phonology

[edit] Vowels

	Front	Central	Back
Close	i		u
Mid	e	ə	o
Open		a	ɑ

Pashto also has the diphthongs /ai/, /əi/, /ɑw/, /aw/.

[edit] Consonants

	Labial	Dental	Alveolar	Retroflex	Post- alveolar	Palatal	Velar	Uvular	Glottal
Nasal	m	n		ɳ
Plosive	p b	t̪ d̪		ʈ ɖ			k ɡ	q	ʔ
Affricate		t͡s d͡z			t͡ʃ d͡ʒ
Fricative	f		s z	(ʂ ʐ)	ʃ ʒ	(ç ʝ)	x ɣ		h
Approximant		l				j	w
Rhotic		r		

The phonemes /q/, /f/ tend to be replaced by [k], [p].
The retroflex lateral flap // (/ɺ̢/) is pronounced as retroflex approximant [ɻ] when final.
The retroflex fricatives /ʂ/, /ʐ/ and palatal fricatives /ç/, /ʝ/ represent dialectally different pronunciations of the same sound, not separate phonemes. In particular, the retroflex fricatives, which represent the original pronunciation of these sounds, are preserved in the southern/southwestern dialects (especially the prestige dialect of Kandahar), while they are pronounced as palatal fricatives in the west-central dialects. Other dialects merge the original retroflexes with other existing sounds: The southeastern dialects merge them with the postalveolar fricatives /ʃ/, /ʒ/, while the northern/northeastern dialects merge them with the velar phonemes in an asymmetric pattern, pronouncing them as /x/, /g/ (not /ɣ/). Furthermore, according to Henderson (1983),^[49] the west-central voiced palatal fricative /ʝ/ actually occurs only in the Wardak Province, and is merged into /g/ elsewhere in the region.
The velars /k/, /ɡ/, /x/, /ɣ/ followed by the close back rounded vowel /u/ assimilate into the labialized velars [kʷ], [ɡʷ], [xʷ], [ɣʷ].

[edit] Vocabulary

In Pashto, most of the native elements of the lexicon are related to other Eastern Iranian languages; those words can be easily compared to those known from Avestan, Ossetic and Pamir languages. However, a remarkably large number of words are special to Pashto.^[6] Post-7th century borrowings came primarily from the Arabic, Persian and Hindustani languages (Pakistan),^[50][51] with the modern educated speech borrowing words from English,^[2] French,^[2] and German.^[2]

[edit] Writing system

Main article: Pashto alphabet

Pashto employs the Pashto alphabet, a modified form of the Persian alphabet which on its part is derived from the Arabic alphabet. The reason for this is because, it is not a Semitic language, and thus it is modified. It has extra letters for Pashto-specific sounds. Since the 17th century Pashto has been primarily written in the Naskh script, rather than the Nasta'liq script used for neighboring Persian and Urdu languages. The Pashto alphabet consists of 45 letters, and 4 diacritic marks. The following table gives the letters' isolated forms, along with IPA values for the letters' typical sounds:

ا /ɑ/, /ʔ/	ب /b/	پ /p/	ت /t̪/	ټ /ʈ/	ث /s/	ج /d͡ʒ/	ځ /d͡z/	چ /t͡ʃ/	څ /t͡s/	ح /h/	خ /x/
د /d̪/	ډ /ɖ/	ﺫ /z/	ﺭ /r/	ړ /~ɻ/	ﺯ /z/	ژ /ʒ/	ږ /ʐ/, /ʝ/, /ɡ/	س /s/	ش /ʃ/	ښ /ʂ/, /ç/, /x/
ص /s/	ض /z/	ط /t̪/	ظ /z/	ع /ʔ/	غ /ɣ/	ف /f/	ق /q/	ك / ک /k/	ګ /ɡ/	ل /l/
م /m/	ن /n/	ڼ /ɳ/	و /w/, /u/, /o/	ه /h/, /a/, /ə/	ۀ /ə/	ي /j/, /i/	ې /e/	ى /ai/, /j/	ۍ /əi/	ئ /əi/

Pashto is written from right to left.

[edit] Dialects

Main article: Pashto dialects

Pashto has two main dialects: a softer dialect spoken in the south, and a harsher dialect in the north. It is dominated by the geographical spread of the shift in the pronunciation of these five consonants:

Southwest	[ʂ]	[ʐ]	[ts]	[dz]	[ʒ]
Southeast	[ʃ]	[ʒ]	[ts]	[dz]	[ʒ]
Central	[ç]	[g]/[ʝ]	[ts]	[z]	[ʒ]
Northeast	[x]	[ɡ]	[s]	[z]	[dʒ]

The morphological differences between the most extreme north-eastern and south-western dialects are comparatively few and unimportant, and the criteria of dialect differentiation in Pashto are primarily phonological.^[52]