Pashto

Letters

Combining marks

Numbers

Punctuation

Other

Vowel sounds

Consonant sounds

	labial	labio- dental	alveolar	post- alveolar	retroflex	palatal	velar	uvular	glottal
stop	p b		t d		ʈ ɖ		k ɡ	q
affricates			t͡s d͡z	t͡ʃ d͡ʒ
fricative		f	s z	ʃ ʒ	ʂ ʐ		x ɣ		h
nasal	m		n		ɳ		ŋ
approximant, trill, flap	w		r l		ɽ 𝼈	j

𝼈 is an allophone of ɽ that appears at the beginning of a syllable or other prosodic unit.wpsl,#Phonology

Tone

Pashto is not a tonal language.

Structure

Pashto words have one of 3 types of stress – strong, medium, and weak –  but stress is not shown in the orthography, even though it is sometimes phonemically distinctive. It also plays a morphological role, particularly in distinguishing verbal forms. It can occur on any syllable, but particularly in first, last, or penultimate syllables.bc,#Pashto, Phonology

Pashto is somewhat unusual in Iranian languages in that there are many words with consonant clusters in syllable onsets. These are usually 2 consonant clusters, but some 3 consonants are also found.bc,#Pashto, Phonology

سخی

Vowel summary table

The following table summarises the main vowel to character assignments.

Vowel diacritics are shown in this table; in normal text these diacritics do not appear. The hyphens on the IPA show whether this is an initial (-x), medial (-x-), or final (x-) form. Forms that are not shown don't occur. A P below a character indicates that this is per the Pakistani orthography.

For additional details see vowel_mappings.

Post-consonant vowels

The Pashto abjad indicates the location of 7 plain vowel sounds using 6 letters, however 2 of those only occur in word-final position, and the remainder also function as consonants, so there is a good deal of ambiguity when reading unvowelled text.

When needed, vowels can be unambiguously represented using the letters and 5 combining marks. This includes a dedicated diacritic to represent ə, 0659, which is unusual, although it is rarely used. Post-consonant vowel sounds are written using the same code points, regardless of the position within a word.

Additional, special letters are used for word-final diphthongs, which usually have grammatical functions as well as representing sounds.

Standalone vowels

Word-initial standalone vowels in Pashto begin with the vowel carrier ا.

Vowels that are only distinguished by diacritics are not distinguished in normal text, and there is a great deal of phonological ambiguity in these spellings. Examples follow:

ايغلو

اصلاح

اومامي

اېموجي

اوبدل

افغان

آره

Vowel sounds to characters

Consonant summary table

The following table summarises the main consonant to character assigments.

For additional details see consonant_mappings.

Basic consonants

The following list shows the basic set of consonant letters used for native Pashto.

There is significant regional variation in the pronunciation of 2 consonant letters in particular. ږ is pronounced ʐ in southern regions, ʝ in the northwest, and ɡ in the northeast. ښ is pronounced ʂ in the south, ç in the northwest, and x in the northeast.

The sound ɡ has 2 allographs. In Pakistan the preferred code point is ګ, whereas the Afghan preference is for گ.

ف is sometimes replaced with پ.

Wikipedia lists a number of common differences between spelling and punctuation or between the spellings of Afghan and Peshawar orthographies. See Orthography differences in Wikipedia for more details.

Unassimilated spellings

Eight more consonant letters are hangovers from the original spellings of loan words whose spellings have not been assimilated into the Pashto alphabet. They don't represent any new sounds.

Sometimes authors may use ك for k, but ک should be used instead.

Consonant clusters

Pashto doesn't normally use any mark to indicate a consonant cluster or consonant without a following vowel. A cluster is simply written as a sequence of consonants.

آيرلنډ

اېسټونيا

Vowelled text may use ْ, but it is rare.

ږمنځ

بړستن

Consonant sounds to characters

Canonically equivalent encodings

Two letters can be represented as an atomic character (the norm), or as a sequence of base letter plus combining mark. The parts are separated in Unicode Normalisation Form D (NFD), and recomposed in Unicode Normalisation Form C (NFC), so both approaches should be treated as canonically equivalent.

Normally, text will use the atomic form, and this is generally recommended by the Unicode Standard.

The decomposition of ۀ is a little unusual. Instead of decomposing to هٔ it decomposes to 06D5 0654, which includes a code point for HEH that is not used otherwise in Pashto. NFD normalisation converts the decomposed sequence back to ۀ.

Confusables & spelling errors

This table lists characters that are often mistakenly used because they look the same as or similar to the code points used for Pashto, or perhaps because the correct character is not available on the user's keyboard.

There appears to be a significant amount of confusion as to when to use ي word-medially and when to use ی. In Wiktionary it is fairly common to see the vowel i represented by the latter when word-medial. If you look the word up in the Pashto Dictionary, however, those words use the former. Applications doing search or collation operations will need to make appropriate allowances.

Similarly, ك can often be found in Pashto texts, but the Pashto standards recommend using ک instead.

Codepoint sequences

Combining marks always follow the base character.

Digits

Pashto uses the set of native digits in the Unicode Arabic block known as Eastern Arabic-Indic digits.

Wikipedia uses ٬ as a thousands separator.

Managing text direction

Unicode provides a set of 10 formatting characters that can be used to control the direction of text when displayed. These characters have no visual form in the rendered text, however text editing applications may have a way to show their location.

202B (RLE), 202A (LRE), and 202C (PDF) are in widespread use to set the base direction of a range of characters. RLE/LRE comes at the start, and PDF at the end of a range of characters for which the base direction is to be set.

In Unicode 6.1, the Unicode Standard added a set of characters which do the same thing but also isolate the content from surrounding characters, in order to avoid spillover effects. They are 2067 (RLI), 2066 (LRI), and 2066 (PDI). The Unicode Standard recommends that these be used instead.

There is also 2068 (FSI), used initially to set the base direction according to the first recognised strongly-directional character.

061C (ALM) is used to produce correct sequencing of numeric data. Follow the link and see expressions for details.

200F (RLM) and 200E (LRM) are invisible characters with strong directional properties that are also sometimes used to produce the correct ordering of text.

For more information about how to use these formatting characters see How to use Unicode controls for bidi text. Note, however, that when writing HTML you should generally use markup rather than these control codes. For information about that, see Creating HTML Pages in Arabic, Hebrew and Other Right-to-left Scripts.

Expressions & sequences

Sequences of numbers are sets of numbers separated by punctuation or spaces, such as 10–12–2022. Sequences of digits, such as 123, in Arabic script text run LTR automatically. Expressions and sequences of numbers follow somewhat complicated rules, which are described in the Arabic language orthography notes.

Cursive script

See type samples.

Arabic script is always cursive, ie. letters in a word are joined up. Fonts need to produce the appropriate joining form for a letter, according to its visual context, but the code point used doesn't change. This results in four different shapes for most letters (including an isolated shape). Ligated forms also join with characters alongside them.

The highlights in the example below show the same letter, ع, with four different joining forms.

Most Arabic script letters join on both sides. A few only join on the right-hand side.

Context-based shaping & positioning

In addition to the cursive shaping, Arabic script glyphs also require context-dependent shaping and positioning. For more information, see the Arabic language orthography notes.

The usual mandatory ligature applies for لا.

لامبو

اسلام

Word boundaries

Words are separated by spaces.

As described in cursivebreaks, compound nouns in the Peshawar orthography tend to be two words with word-final shaping intact, but rammed together with no space between.

لاس‌لیک

Graphemes

tbd

Phrase, sentence, and section delimiters are described in phrase.

Phrase & section boundaries

See type samples.

The following punctuation marks are attested in Pashto texts.

Pashto uses a mixture of ASCII, Arabic, and other punctuation.

Some Pashto texts appear to use ۔ as a full stop. This is the case for the sample at the beginning of this page, which appears to use a Peshawar orthography.

Mirrored characters

The words 'left' and 'right' in the Unicode names for parentheses, brackets, and other paired characters should be ignored. LEFT should be read as if it said START, and RIGHT as END. The direction in which the glyphs point will be automatically determined according to the base direction of the text.

The number of characters that are mirrored in this way is around 550, most of which are mathematical symbols. Some are single characters, rather than pairs. The following are some of the more common ones.

(␣)␣<␣>␣[␣]␣{␣}␣«␣»␣‹␣›

Quotations & citations

See type samples.

The following types of quotation mark can be found in Pashto texts. (Of course, depending on ease of input, quotations may also be surrounded by ASCII double and single quote marks.)

Unlike brackets, the first two sets of quote marks are not mirrored during display. As a result, LEFT means use on the left, and RIGHT means use on the right.

Line breaking & hyphenation

Lines are generally broken between words. They are not broken at the small gaps that appear where a character doesn't join on the left.

General page layout & progression

Pashto books, magazines, etc., are bound on the right-hand side, and pages progress from right to left.

Columns are vertical but run right-to-left across the page.