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The article overviews the earliest Pashto texts, mostly poetic, in which the incipient forms of literary criticism can be traced as authorial self-reflections related in Persian classics to the self-praise genre (fakhriyya) and explanations of reasons for composing works (sabab-i taʾlīf). Under close examination are the seventeenth century verses of the poets affiliated with the Roshānī religious community and the writings of Khushḥāl Khān Khaṫak (d. 1689). Analyzed texts prove that through the rudimentary discourse on a variety of literary criticism topics, Pashtun authors of early modern times declared and justified the presence of emerging literature in Pashto within the Persophone cultural space of Mughal India, articulating simultaneously their commitment to the proliferation of literacy and Islamic book culture among their countrymen.

Medicinal plants are highly used in the ethnoveterinary practice as considerable livestock resources in remote areas. The aim of the present study is to explore the ethnoveterinary medicinal practices in three different communities and discuss the cross‐cultural consensus on the usage of medicinal plants for the treatment of animals. The field survey was conducted by the animal healers of the area during the different seasons of plant growth. A total of 83 informants were interviewed through Semi‐structured interview involving experts of traditional knowledge in 21 localities of the three regions (Zhob, D. I. Khan and Mianwali) were conducted. Findings of the study were quantitatively analyzed through the informant consensus factors to identify the homogeneity information provided by the informants. Furthermore, cross‐culture consensuses were analyzed and recorded data were represented in a tabulated and Venn diagrams. In particularly, 59 species of plants were documented in the comparative analysis. Among them, 32 plant species were recorded in Pashto community, while Punjabi and Sarakai communities exhibited nine and four plant species, respectively. Whereas cross‐cultural analysis showed 14 medicinal plants that were commonly utilized by three different ethnic communities, that indicated low interregional consensus in regard to ethnoveterinary practices of medicinal plants. The current study showed that different communities and ethnic groups sharing some traditional knowledge and cross‐culturally approaches have been reported from traditional uses of plants against livestock's diseases. Therefore, current findings are the opportunities to scrutinize the plants for the discovery of new drug sources for humans and animals., This research work provides the cross‐cultural information about medicinal plants in different communities of three different regions in the Southwest Pakistan. Cross‐cultural analysis showed medicinal plants was commonly used among three ethnic communities that indicates a low interregional consensus with regard to the ethnoveterinary practices of medicinal plants.

Purpose of the Study: The present research investigates the use of English codeswitching about the social factors which influence the use of English in the Pashto language. First, the focus of the study lies on the social factors e.g., style, interlocutors, topic, social distance, social status, and identity, etc., and their influence on English codeswitching in the Pashto language. Methodology of the study: The data was collected with the help of a questionnaire consist of 13th statements. The data collected were further analyzed with the help of quantitative and qualitative methods employing descriptive analysis, SPSS 15, and the percentage method. Main Findings: The dominant pattern of codeswitching was insertion with nouns the most frequent codeswitching item. The study indicates that education is the key factor that influences English codeswitching and it also shows that Pashto is the dominant language of communication and is used as a symbol of solidarity and social marker in the Pashto speech community. Application of the study: The researcher can extend this study of codeswitching to a different contact setting such Pashto-Urdu and Pashto-Punjabi. The density of bilingualism is expected to give different types of codeswitching patterns. Novelty/Originality of this study: This study is the pioneer study that focused on the effect of social factors on the selection of language in bilingual settings.

This article traces the evolution of the ideological construction of elite multilingualism, with a focus on the values accorded to French and English, under transforming socioeconomic and institutional conditions at the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). The ICRC, a major humanitarian agency based in Geneva, opens a window onto the construction of “internationalisation” and its accompanying language ideologies, resulting in fluctuating hiring requirements for “delegates” (expatriate representatives). The data include job advertisements for delegate posts from 1989 to 2020 complemented by interviews with different generations of delegates and ethnographic fieldwork in a recruitment fair. The analysis of language ideological debates at the ICRC illuminates the articulations and tensions between “roots” in Geneva, symbolised by French, and “routes” in its delegations worldwide, with English as a lingua franca, in dominant discourses about multilingualism. The requirements for ICRC delegates include English as a must and at least a second ICRC working language. Concerning the latter, there are tensions between the desired language regime at headquarters, privileging French as the “parent” language, and the current needs in key operations, with a shortage of Arabic speakers. The analysis shows that French requirements for generalist delegates have fluctuated from perfect command and good knowledge to an optional second working language. In the 2020 recruitment campaign, elite multilingualism is hierarchically stratified into English as a global language, other “working languages” including Arabic, and non-European languages such as Pashto or Dari as newly-introduced “assets”.

It is a well-known fact that Pashto belongs to those Eastern Iranian languages, which show lambdacism. While similarities exist with Bactrian and Munji-Yidgha, the situation in Pashto is not exactly the same, and is in any case far more complicated. Especially interesting in this respect is the development of Old Iranian *t, which is sometimes shifted to l in Pashto proper and y in Waneci, sometimes yields the voiced dental d, or, as a third outcome, disappears in all varieties. In this paper, it is argued that the first lambdacism of (Old Iranian *d >) *δ > l, in the early first millennium A.D., spread from Bactrian, the prestigious lingua franca of the Kushan and subsequent Empires, into the contemporary ancestors of Munji(-Yidgha), Pashto and Prasun. Almost a millennium later, there was another, geographically far more limited lambdacism. This time, one subgroup of Pashto from which all Pashto proper dialects would emerge, changed, at least in certain environments, (Old Iranian *t >) *d > *δ to l, while it was changed to a palatal glide in Waneci. In other phonological environments, *d had disappeared before it could be shifted to l and y, respectively, and left no traces in contemporary dialects. In those cases where *t corresponds to d in all contemporary varieties of Pashto, we are dealing with a secondary restoration of the dental or sandhi, which lead to a voicing of initial *t.

Javed Ihsas is a prominent contemporary Pashto poet, critic, and columnist. He writes poetry with the new spirit and style of the modern critical theories of literature and philosophy. In his verses, we can observe the elements of Modernism and Post-modernism as well. In this study, we explored the post-modernist elements in his poetry, especially in his Pashto poetic collection titled Ayina. The word 'Ayina' is a Pashto word that means 'The Mirror'. The very title of the collection gives a symbolic representation in the sense that it depicts a realistic picture of society. This study is an attempt to examine the Post-modernist elements in his poetry by using a post-modernist approach. The poet touches on the elements of post-modernism in his poetry such as the element of social construction; the notion that ideas, politics, and language are socially constructed, consumerism, postponement, etc. This study explores the post-modernist elements in Javed Ihsas’ poetry which are will prove a beacon light for the young poets.

Purpose of the study: Phonological variation in diphthongs, when spoken as a second or foreign language, is an accepted phenomenon. The diphthongs of English when pronounced by native speakers of Pashto go through certain changes and sometimes, monophthised. The purpose of the present study is to investigate phonological variation, i.e., monophthongisation of English diphthongs. Methodology: For this purpose, 20 Pashto speakers of both soft and hard dialects were taken and they were asked to pronounce the words having the target diphthongs at initial, medial and final position, followed and preceded by voiced and voiceless sounds. PRAAT was used to analyze the data to measure the possible variations in the sounds. Main Findings: The findings show that the phenomenon of monophthongisation of English diphthongs is common in the speaking of native speakers of Pashto. The study further shows that there is the lengthening of some of the sounds and deletion as well in certain contexts. This makes the variety of English spoken by the native speakers of Pashto a separate variety. Applications of this study: This study has applications for English language learners and teachers. The learners and teachers of English can benefit from this research and they can work on the problematic diphthongs that are usually monophthised. In this way, these sounds can be practised and the problems can be rectified. Novelty/Originality of this study: This is an original study where the problematic diphthongs have been considered and researched that how these English diphthongs are monophthised by the native speakers of Pashto making it a distinctive feature of the native Pashto speakers of English.

The article is devoted to the comparative, as well as the criteria for highlighting the circumstance of the mode of action in the Pashto language, approaches to the selection of the circumstance of the mode of action among other grammatical categories in Pashto and Russian. In terms of the functional features of adverbs, it is worth noting that an adverb always performs the function of a circumstance in a sentence. For example, the circumstances of time, place, degree, or mode of action in both Pashto and Russian. In the adverbialization characteristic of the Pashto language adverbs, it can be noted that this paragraph considers the process of the transition of adverbs to other parts of speech. In the Pashto language, as in the Russian language, the circumstance is divided into the following groups: place, time, degree, mode of action, and others.

Handwritten text recognition is considered as the most challenging task for the research community due to slight change in different characters’ shape in handwritten documents. The unavailability of a standard dataset makes it vaguer in nature for the researchers to work on. To address these problems, this paper presents an optical character recognition system for the recognition of offline Pashto characters. The problem of the unavailability of a standard handwritten Pashto characters database is addressed by developing a medium-sized database of offline Pashto characters. This database consists of 11352 character images (258 samples for each 44 characters in a Pashto script). Enriched feature extraction techniques of histogram of oriented gradients and zoning-based density features are used for feature extraction of carved Pashto characters. K-nearest neighbors is considered as a classification tool for the proposed algorithm based on the proposed feature sets. A resultant accuracy of 80.34% is calculated for the histogram of oriented gradients, while for zoning-based density features, 76.42% is achieved using 10-fold cross validation.

In the area of machine learning, different techniques are used to train machines and perform different tasks like computer vision, data analysis, natural language processing, and speech recognition. Computer vision is one of the main branches where machine learning and deep learning techniques are being applied. Optical character recognition (OCR) is the ability of a machine to recognize the character of a language. Pashto is one of the most ancient and historical languages of the world, spoken in Afghanistan and Pakistan. OCR application has been developed for various cursive languages like Urdu, Chinese, and Japanese, but very little work is done for the recognition of the Pashto language. When it comes to handwritten character recognition, it becomes more difficult for OCR to recognize the characters as every handwritten character’s shape is influenced by the writer’s hand motion dynamics. The reason for the lack of research in Pashto handwritten character data as compared to other languages is because there is no benchmark dataset available for experimental purposes. This study focuses on the creation of such a dataset, and then for the evaluation purpose, a machine is trained to correctly recognize unseen Pashto handwritten characters. To achieve this objective, a dataset of 43000 images was created. Three Feed Forward Neural Network models with backpropagation algorithm using different Rectified Linear Unit (ReLU) layer configurations (Model 1 with 1-ReLU Layer, Model 2 with 2-ReLU layers, and Model 3 with 3-ReLU Layers) were trained and tested with this dataset. The simulation shows that Model 1 achieved accuracy up to 87.6% on unseen data while Model 2 achieved an accuracy of 81.60% and 3% accuracy, respectively. Similarly, loss (cross-entropy) was the lowest for Model 1 with 0.15 and 3.17 for training and testing, followed by Model 2 with 0.7 and 4.2 for training and testing, while Model 3 was the last with loss values of 6.4 and 3.69. The precision, recall, and f-measure values of Model 1 were better than those of both Model 2 and Model 3. Based on results, Model 1 (with 1 ReLU activation layer) is found to be the most efficient as compared to the other two models in terms of accuracy to recognize Pashto handwritten characters.

This article offers a comparative examination of the literary responses of four leading early modern Pashtun authors to an armed clash in the Momand tribe in 1711. The responses include a chronicle record in prose (Afżal Khān Khaṫak) and three poems – an elegy (ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Momand), a satire (ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd Momand), and a war ode (ʿAbd al-Qādir Khaṫak). Discussed as both authentic historical documents and creative writings linked to a local social discourse, these Pashto texts enable us to reassess the intensity of everyday literary communications in Pashtun tribal areas in early modern times and append new factual material to the study of ethno-cultural processes within the Persophone oecumene. The salient stylistic and rhetoric diversity of the texts not only highlights the authors’ individual mindsets and literary techniques, but also provides an insight into a variety of social moods, political attitudes and ethics in the Pashtun traditional society.

Pashto scripts are cursive in nature and hard to recognize in real-time. Native speakers of the Pashto language are large in numbers and reside in different regions of the world. Due to the cursive nature of the Pashto script along with variations in character strokes, the printed, as well as handwritten characters, are difficult to be detected, classified or recognized. In real-time handwritten character recognition systems, the challenging factors that constraints the system depends on the stroke noise, geometric behavior (like rotation, scaling and shifting, etc.) of the text. In this article, we provide an efficient technique that aimed to recognize handwritten characters in real-time by first smoothing the noise components in the text and then extract shape-based invariant features from the handwritten strokes. For real-time recognition of characters, the probability-based multi-class Naïve Bayesian classifier is exploited, which determines the probabilities of geometric invariant features to predict the character with the highest likelihood. The performance of the proposed approach has been validated through extensive experiments and based on the recognition matrices, the proposed technique achieves an accuracy of 97.5% for online Pashto handwritten characters in real-time.

This paper presents an efficient Optical Character Recognition (OCR) system for offline isolated Pashto characters recognition. Developing an OCR system for handwritten character recognition is a challenging task because of the handwritten characters vary both in shape and in style and most of the time the handwritten characters also vary among the individuals. The identification of the inscribed Pashto letters becomes even palling due to the unavailability of a standard handwritten Pashto characters database. For experimental and simulation purposes a handwritten Pashto characters database is developed by collecting handwritten samples from the students of the university on A4 sized page. These collected samples are then scanned, stemmed and preprocessed to form a medium sized database that encompasses 14784 handwritten Pashto character images (336 distinguishing handwritten samples for each 44 characters in Pashto script). Furthermore, the Zernike moments are considered as a feature extractor tool for the proposed OCR system to extract features of each individual character. Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) is followed as a recognition tool for the proposed recognition system based on the calculated features map using Zernike moments. Applicability of the proposed system is tested by validating it with 10-fold cross-validation method and an overall accuracy of 63.71% is obtained for the handwritten Pashto isolated characters using the proposed OCR system.

Nowadays, Pakistan faces sever environmental problems in spite of existing laws willing to defend the sustainable environment. In today’s environmental crisis, print media has a unique role to play among various stakeholders which consists of policy makers, Government, NGO’s and the public at large level. No one can deny from the role of print media as a source of information about education for millions of readers. There are many newspapers such as national Urdu, English and regional published daily in Pakistan. In Pakistan, media is also divided language with series of media in vernacular languages including Sindhi, Punjabi and Pashto. In this research, the content analysis of three newspapers Daily Dawn, Daily Jang and Daily Kawish was done of 2016, year to check the Length and Frequency of five major environmental issues Water Crisis, Agriculture Crisis, Pollution, Climate change and Deforestation. The data of following issues were analyzed by using tabulations month wise and finally year wise. English newspaper Dawn has given more coverage to these concerned issues, while secondly Urdu Jang newspaper has given coverage and Kawish has covered less number of stories regarding five major environmental issues.

The present study investigates the acoustic properties of English long vowels produced by Pashto speakers by highlighting the problematic areas for Pashto speakers learning English. The data was collected from ten Pashtun learners of English through tape recorder. The data was analyzed using PRAAT software. The spectrograms produced by the software helped us in specifying the acoustic values (formant frequencies of F1 and F2) of target vowels compared with the production of the same vowels by native speakers of English. The analysis of the collected data revealed the problematic areas of English long vowels for Pashtun learners of English. The study proved that English long vowels like /I:/ and /a:/ were more problematic for Pashtun learners. A significant difference was seen in both the height and backness of the target English vowels produced by the subjects. The English vowels like /e:/ and /o:/ produced by subjects were like those produced by the native speakers. Similarly, target vowel like /u:/ was pronounced by subjects like native speakers of English. The study recommends that Pashto speakers should be given proper training for acquiring correct pronunciation of English.

It is known that various peoples throughout the Islamic world adopted the Arabic alphabet to write their original writing with an adapted version of Arabic script. Thus, various languages are currently written using Arabic script, such as Persian (Iran), Pashto, Dari (Afghanistan), Urdu (India, Pakistan), Javanese (Indonesia), Malay (Malaysia), Kurdish (Iraq), and Uyghur (China). This variety of languages used different Arabic script styles such as naskh, ruq’a, nasta‘liq (farsi), diwani, and square kufic. When typography was first introduced in the Arab world in the 17th Century, there were no typefaces (printing letters) that respected the grammar of Arabic script. However, the Bulaq Press played an essential role in promoting the spirit of scholarship and knowledge dissemination in Egypt and the Near East during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The shift of book production in Egypt after 1850 was marked by the graphic technology evolution, the use of different languages in its printed productions: Arabic, Turkish and Persian. In addition, Bulaq Press managed to be a pioneer in the Islamic World by printing the Quran during King Fouad’s reign (1923). The latter is considered a master work from which the Bulaq Press typeface was revived and ready to be used in new publication. Thus, the BA Writing and Scripts Center (WSC) managed to digitize the naskh typeface of the Bulaq Press Quran and printed it on a CD. Our intent is to suggest a multidisciplinary project that investigates the evolution of Bulaq Press typefaces, then to explain the method used by the Bulaq Press Quran typeface to digitize, and finally to initiate a multidisciplinary collaboration to fulfill this ambitious project. On sait que divers peuples du monde musulman ont adopté et adapté un alphabet arabe pour leur écriture d’origine. Ces populations ont remplacé leur écriture originale par une version adaptée de l’écriture arabe. C’est pourquoi aujourd’hui plusieurs langues sont actuellement écrites en utilisant l’alphabet arabe, comme le persan (Iran), le pachto, le dari (Afghanistan), l'ourdou (Inde, Pakistan), le javanais (Indonésie), le malais (Malaisie), le kurde (Irak) et le Ouïgour (Chine). Cette variété de langues utilise différents styles de calligraphie arabe tels que le naskh, le ruq‘a, le nasta‘liq (farsi), le diwani et le coufique carré. L’imprimerie de Boulaq a joué un rôle essentiel dans la promotion de l'esprit d'érudition et la diffusion des connaissances en Égypte et au Proche-Orient au cours des xixe et xxe siècles. Les changements dans la production des livres en Égypte après 1850 ont été marqués par l'évolution de la technologie graphique et l'utilisation de différentes langues dans ses productions imprimées : l'arabe, le turc et le persan. En outre, l’imprimerie de Boulaq a réussi à être un pionnier dans le monde islamique en imprimant le Coran pendant le règne du roi Fouad (1923). En 2012-2013, le Centre d'écriture et de script de la Bibliotheca Alexandrina a numérisé la police de caractères naskh du Coran de l’imprimerie de Boulaq et l’a l'enregistré sur un CD. Cependant, d'autres polices de caractères peuvent être numérisées grâce à une enquête sur les publications de l’imprimerie de Boulaq. Notre article présente un projet multidisciplinaire qui étudie l'évolution des polices de caractères de l’imprimerie de Boulaq, puis explique la méthodologie avec laquelle la police de caractères du Coran de l’imprimerie de Boulaq a été numérisée. من المعروف أن شعوباً شتى على امتداد العالم الإسلامي قد تبنَّت الكتابة بالحروف العربية تعبيراً عن قبولها للثقافة الإسلامية واندماجها فيها. وقد تخلَّت هذه الشعوب عن الكتابة بالحروف الأصلية في لغاتها وأحلَّت محلَّها صيغةً معدَّلةً من الحروف العربية. ونتيجةً لذلك، توجد في الوقت الحالي لغات عديدة تستخدم الحروف العربية، مثل الفارسية (إيران)، والبشتون والدارية (أفغانستان)، والأُردية (الهند وباكستان)، والجاوية (إندونيسيا)، والملاوية (ماليزيا)، والكردية (العراق)، والأويغورية (الصين). وتستخدم هذه اللغات المتنوعة أنماطاً مختلفة من الخطوط العربية، مثل النَسْخ والرُقعة والتعليق/النستعليق (الفارسي)، والديواني، والكوفي المربَّع. وقد لعبت «مطبعة بولاق» دوراً جوهرياً في النهوض بروح الاطلاع والبحث والمعرفة ونشرها في مصر والشرق الأدنى خلال القرنين التاسع عشر والعشرين. واتسم التحوَّل إلى إنتاج الكتب في مصر بعد عام ١٨٥٠ بتطور تقني في الرسم، وباستخدام لغات مختلفة في المطبوعات، مثل العربية والتركية والفارسية. وبالإضافة إلى ذلك، نجحت «مطبعة بولاق» في أن تكون لها الريادة في العالم الإسلامي بقيامها بطباعة القرآن الكريم في عهد الملك فؤاد (١٩٢٣). وفي عامي ٢٠١٢-٢٠١٣، نجح «مركز دراسات الخطوط» بمكتبة الإسكندرية في رقمنة (digitalization) شكل خط النَسْخ، الذي كتُبت به نسخة القرآن الكريم الصادرة عن «مطبعة بولاق»، وطبعه على اسطوانة مُدمجة (CD). إلا إن هناك أشكال حروف أخرى متعددة يمكن رقمنتها من خلال تقصي وفحص إصدارات «مطبعة بولاق». وتهدف هذه الدراسة إلى اقتراح مشروع متعدد التخصصات لتقصي وفحص أشكال الحروف في إصدارات «مطبعة بولاق»، ثم شرح المنهجية التي تمت بها رقمنة شكل الخط الذي كُتبت به نسخة القرآن الكريم الصادرة عن «مطبعة بولاق».

Since Quran, being the words of Allah the almighty ,has been bestowed in Arabic Language, but his followers have different languages. Pukhtoon Society, who’s non-Arab converted to Islam and play their part in transferring themes of the Qur’an into their mother tongue Pahsto. Partial translations of the Qur’an were made as early as the first half of the 17th century AD in Pashto. It seems unlikely that Pathan had no contact with the Qur’an before this date. Keeping in view the importance of translation in Pashto language of the Holy Quran, it has attracted the attention of various scholars and researchers. The following research paper aims at exploring the contribution of the Ulema of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in this connection .For this purpose eihgt nominated scripts have been selected to point out the importance of published Pashto translations of the Qur’an and their brief study. Analysis includes methodology of the translator, his command over the Arabic language and his awareness of the necessary sciences compulsory for a translator of the Qur’an.

Pashto language, spoken in two countries Afghanistan and Pakistan, has numerous dialects. Existing studies show maximum five groups of the varieties of Pashto. Geographical and political factors followed by the absence of a comprehensive study of the Pashto dialects caused divided orthography and lack of unified literary and standard dialect in Pashto. This article mainly focuses on the classification, differences and literary and social status of the two mentioned dialects. Kandahari and Yusufzai dialects have been analyzed and compared mainly on phonological bases.

Code-switching can be used to express and create different meanings and ideologies, as well as different identities. Speakers can choose various codes in their linguistic repertoires to do these things. In academic settings in Pakistan, English is likely to be used with Urdu and regional languages, such as Pashto, resulting in the expression and construction of different identities. In order to examine the link between code-switching and identity in a multilingual academic setting, this paper examines the construction of identity that emerges from code-switching practices among a group of lecturers and students at a university in Pakistan. Data were collected through recordings of interactions supplemented with semi-structured interviews, which were then ethnographically analysed from a micro-macro perspective. The findings revealed a seamless and dynamic use of code - switching, which was mainly in English and Pashto. The fluid nature of the code - switching makes it seem as if speakers have developed a different ‘language’ combining Pashto and English. Such use of code-switching reflects their socialisation in a multilingual and multicultural environment, which in turn, has led to the emergence of their hybrid identity orientations. The study contributes empirical evidence of the link between code - switching and hybrid identities in a multilingual context. The findings also imply that interactive practices should be examined from a dynamic micro-macro perspective because changes in the social environment can affect the thinking, perceptions, behaviours, and identity-orientations of the speakers.

Bilingualism has been a myth for linguists and language policy and planning professionals for decades. Current study observes morphological ability and bilingual profile of L1 and L2 of Pashto mother-tongue children. Bilingual profile of the participants measured through bilingual language profile (BLP) tool. Both L1 and L2 children were tested before and after intervention. Morphological ability was measured through 4 M model. After 4 weeks of intervention, experimental child was able to read and write complex words with bridge morphemes. In contrast, controlled sample was not exposed to the intervention. The participants performed assigned language tasks and their performance-expressions were analyzed. Study confirms that early and late bridge morphemes are acquired and children have intelligibility of the language despite the fact that BLP shows low profile of the mother tongue. Significant effects of mother tongue were recorded in the participants’ performance. Effects of explicit morphological instruction was focused on identifying Pashto orthography and applying morphological ability on word formations. Findings reveal bilingual profile and patterns of morphological ability after didactic practice of intervention. Intervention contributed in developing Pashto orthography that was crucial for reading and writing proficiency. Direct impact on text-based inference and reading comprehension was another milestone of this qusai-experimental research. This model can be used for longitudinal studies.

The study is concerned with the phonological reduction in Pashto. The study particularly focuses on the reduction in the structure of complex predicates, verbal clitics and postpositional phrases in Pashto. The study finds out that the phonological reduction has syntactic/semantic or phonological factors allowing or constraining it. These more or less reduced and expanded forms are closely related to a number of linguistics abstractions. In structures with verbal clitics and postpositions, the reduction is optional, while in structure with complex predicates, the phonological reduction is obligatory if the compound verb denotes imperfective aspect. The obligatory reduction makes a single phonological unit from two syntactic units by omitting consonants or vowels in the structure of the phrase. The reduction is avoided if it creates an ambiguity of some kind or if the meaning of the lexical items is changed, and so, its allowance in one structure is constrained in another.

Intending to identify that how meaning in the source text has been reproduced in the translated text, the study attempts to investigate deforming tendencies used in the selected poems of Abdul Ghani Khan translated from Pashto into English by Imtiaz Ahmed Sahibzada. Imtiaz Sahibzada has translated 141 poems from the mammoth corpus of Abdul Ghani Khan's Poetry into English and named it The Pilgrim of a Beauty. Using judgmental sampling, ten poems were selected and were analysed in the light of Antoine Berman's (1965) Text Deformation System which includes twelve deforming tendencies. While analysing the translated text in comparison with the source text, deformation in terms of semantics and the syntactic structure was found. Abdul Ghani Khan's poetry translation is considerably deformed, and the translator has little maintained the composition, musicality, and structure of the source text because of different reasons. He has deformed the beauty of the source text poems at the cost of the message due to the use of various deforming tendencies.

Domains divide language according to the particular context of its use. Concerning different contexts of research, the domain varies. The purpose of the present research is to explore the sociolinguistic significance of Pashto-English hybridization in the language domains. To explore the area, TV programmes from a Pashto channel Khyber News were selected through purposive sampling. As two episodes from each programme were selected, thus a total of ten programmes were taken for analysis that makes about 10 hours of recording. For data analysis, Kachru’s (1978) framework was used. The findings show that according to different domains of language use, the frequency of hybridized words varied. In the domain of Government and Administration and School and Education, mostly words were hybridized, followed by the domain of Economy, Playground and Street, Military and Courts. The findings reveal that domains have sociolinguistic significance that determines the extent to which language is hybridized.

The present study is concerned with the investigation of the language attitude of Pashto speakers towards English. The study aims to look into issues of language interplay of Pashto language with the English language. The study took the data from undergraduate level students through a questionnaire and found out that most of the speakers have a positive attitude towards the English language. They are of the view that through the English language they explore the world more and more because most of the materials are available in the English language and by learning it one can express himself. They opined that the government should declare English as the official language of the state once again because it is still the medium of instruction in most parts of the country. This shift of change of the official language created difficulty in learning, though they are of the view that we can contribute to society without English.

Grammar, although indispensable for successful communication, is always a dry subject for most learners and needs a high motivation for learning. Motivating language learners for learning grammar of English in Pakistan has always been a challenging task for the language instructors. This study investigated whether language games motivate adult learners for learning grammar or not. Language games were adopted as a motivational strategy for teaching English grammar to a sample of 31 male and 19 female first-year undergraduates of Islamia College Peshawar, who were not studying English as a major subject; their ages ranged between 19 to 22 years and they spoke Pashto as mother tongue. After teaching them grammar for one semester, the instructors—the researchers themselves—sought their feedback on the use of games through a 25-item questionnaire comprising sub-sets such as interest, satisfaction, effort, tension, choice, usefulness, competition, and pre- and post-treatment experience of learning grammar. The findings of the study manifest that language games motivate not only young learners but also adult language learners. It was suggested that teaching-learning activity based on games should be made an integral part of the course of students of primary and high schools, in addition to being made a part of the primary and high school teacher education.

Questions about word formation remain one of the most pressing problems of modern linguistics. The relevance of this issue is increasing, especially for less-studied languages such as the Pashto language, since the vocabulary of the language is constantly being enriched under modern requirements. The need to express new concepts arising from progress in various spheres of life gives rise to the need to create new lexical units based on the language’s capabilities and resources. The study of this process on a scientifc basis, the defnition of its directions, the defnition of its specifcs based on the analysis of language material today is of great theoretical and practical importance. Composing copulative compound words is one of the interesting and almost unexplored areas of this topic in every respect. There are works in science in which this topic was partially touched upon, but more than 40 years have passed since the last of them were published. During this period, there have been signifcant changes in the composition of the vocabulary of the Pashto language, including in the methods of composing a copulative compound word. Since the vocabulary of a language is dynamic, the study of processes occurring in it in synchronous terms is always of scientifc signifcance. An important component aspect of this issue is the study of copulative compound words formed using prepositionsinfxes, as well as the connecting infx. This scientifc article is devoted to the analysis based on analytical and synthetic methods for the formation of copulative compound words with a combination of prepositions-infxes [ هپpә], [ انnā], [ رپpәr], [ هلlә], [ دdә] in the Pashto language, as well as on the place of the connecting-infx of [ واaw] in copulative compound word formation. In the article, the question in the specifc form of prepositional infxes and copulative compound words made with the use of the connecting infx [ واaw] is defned as the subject of research, and modern materials of the Pashto language-as the object of the research. The scientifc novelty of the work is also reflected in these issues. The article analyzes both groups of prepositioninfxes and connecting infxes

The purpose of the research is to investigate the representation or misrepresentation of Pashtun culture through the study of different signs and to inspect that how these signs relate to Pashtun culture by employing semiotics as a tool. To achieve the goal, twelve distinct Pashto film posters that were published during 2011-2017 were selected and categorized under poster design, dressing, props and titles, as these aspects act as signs for depicting cultural insights. The research was guided by the Pierce triadic model for analyzing the type of signs and their interpretation. Various iconic, indexical and symbolic signs were discovered representing the Pashtu cultural traits through certain signs, e.g., traditional dressing, chivalry, male dominance and women segregation, etc. On the other hand, certain extraneous signs were explored, distorting the purity of Pashtun culture by utilizing various signs that were interpreted as referring to violence and vulgarity, which are not acceptable in real Pashtun culture.

The tense driven asymmetry of the Pashto clause is analyzed from the perspective of the minimalist framework The study proves that the split ergativity in Pashto is tense based and does not have the aspect driven features proposed by Roberts 2000 The study argues that the object is assigned a theta role by the V and the subject is assigned a theta role by the little v The accusative case is assigned by the little v but the nominative and ergative cases are assigned by T It claims that the T head assigns multiple cases as the split ergativity is tense driven It highlights the syntactic effects of the possible phonological processes in combining some of the closely adjacent words and making a single phonological word The study also discusses clitic placement and prosodic inversion to refute the assumption that perfective feature is a strong feature in Pashto

This study is about the spelling performance of phonemes /f/ and /p/ among Pashtun students. It analyzes the role of the position of the target phonemes, the role of the level of education and that of gender on the spelling performance of the students. A questionnaire of 30 words was developed and was surveyed in a sample of 64 students equally divided between male and female respondents. 16 students (8 male and 8 female) were randomly selected from SSC, Intermediate, Graduate and Post Graduate classes, and their responses were analyzed. The results show that the Pashtun students find it difficult to differentiate between /f/ and /p/; however, with an increase in the level of education of the students, the spelling performance improves. Moreover, the position of the phoneme in words has less effect on the spelling performance of the students but, gender plays a significant role, and the male students have more difficulty in spelling the target phonemes than the female students.

Syllabification of words plays a vital role in learning native like pronunciation. The present study tried to explore the syllabification of English words by Pashto speakers. The study aimed to put light on the problematic areas for Pashto speakers in terms of syllabification of English words. The data was collected from twenty undergraduate students and analyzed with reliable scientific tools. The analyzed data proved that English words having triphthongs were problematic for Pashto speakers. In addition to it, words having syllabic consonants were also problematic for Pashto speakers. Furthermore, words containing x in spelling also proved to be problematic for Pashto speakers. English words having the syllable structure CVC.VC were incorrectly syllabified CV.CVC. Pashto speakers faced problems in the identification of syllable boundaries in words where consonant clusters are used. The study recommends that Pashto speakers need proper training for learning correct syllabification of English words.

This paper aims to explore the Cultural Sufism of Khorasan. The overall culture of Afghanistan is very ancient almost two millennia old. It traces it's records to times of Achaemenid Empire of 500BC. The word Afghanistan is translated as "Land of the Afghans" or "Place of Afghans". The official languages of Afghan nation are Pashto and Dari. It is a tribal and rural society with many different regions in the country and each region having distinctive indigenous language. In spite of having some differences almost all Afghans follow a same Islamic tradition and behave accordingly. By following a similar Islamic tradition, they celebrate similar holidays, wear almost same dresses, enjoy same taste of food and music. Sufism has shaped Afghan society and politics for much of the country's history. Today, very few are aware of this legacy. The Sufis are now providing an important contribution to the stability of the state. Some of the greatest Sufi sages of the Muslim world originated from Afghanistan. They refined their insights in the country's lush plains and hidden valleys - and spread their message of peace and love to other parts of the world. The intensely personal poetry of Sufis has been expressed in Dari, Persian and Pashto, the main languages spoken in Afghanistan.

This article focuses on mother tongue teaching in Arabic, Dari, Pashto and Somali as it is practised in a linguistically diverse primary school in Denmark. The article draws on a linguistic ethnogr...

The book by Niʿmatallāh Haravī, the Mughal chronicler of the early seventeenth century, was the first and the only attempt to recount the entire history of Afghans (Pashtuns) in the vein of Persian medieval historiography. The text of the book has survived in two versions which strongly vary in its content, volume and structure. An opinion prevails that the book’s extended version (Tārīkh-i Khānjahānī va Makhzan-i Afghānī) is the original author’s edition, while its smaller variant (Makhzan-i Afghānī) is a later revised edition, probably compiled by another person. The article offers a correction of this view through the rereading of the author’s introduction and afterword to the book, and the analysis of the work’s structure and occasional editorial remarks. It is very likely that the book’s extant versions were different editions of its first preliminary variant (1610–1611) which bore the title Makhzan-i Afghānī (“The Afghan Treasury”) and contained mainly mythologized stories about Afghans’ poorly known origins and remote past. The book’s extended version (1612–1615), supplemented with data from authoritative written sources on the history of the Afghans in North India in the Late Middle Ages and Early Modern times, was bound to meet the standards of professional historiographical literature. Besides, this version was supposed to gain official endorsement of the book’s dedicatee, the Afghan general Khānjahān Lōdī, whose name appeared in its title (Tārīkh-i Khānjahānī). An unknown compiler of the third edition, which was translated into Pashto in the beginning of the eighteenth century, took as a basis the original short variant of the book, having added to it selected material from the extended second edition.

The study investigates the role of suffixation in Pashto-English hybridization at the word level and the sociolinguistic significance of such hybridization. Data from electronic media, including programmes from Khyber News, representing both formal and informal domains of language use, is used for the study. The programmes selected include Top Stories, News Hour, Mohim Repotuna, Naway Sahar and Sports Mag. Employing content analysis as a research method, a quantitative approach for the investigation of hybridized English lexical category and a qualitative approach for its sociolinguistic significance have been used. The present study employs the framework presented by Kachru (1978), as adapted by Rasul (2006). The findings of the research show that noun is frequently hybridized both in formal and informal domains of language used mostly by the addition of Pashto inflectional suffixes. It is concluded that suffixation got an important role in Pashto-English hybridization that leads to the creation of hybrid forms predicting language shift and the emergence of a new variety of Pashto.

Pashto is one of the most ancient and historical languages in the world and is spoken in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Various languages like Urdu, English, Chinese, and Japanese have OCR applications, but very little work has been conducted on the Pashto language in this perspective. It becomes more difficult for OCR applications to recognize handwritten characters and digits, because handwriting is influenced by the writer’s hand dynamics. Moreover, there was no publicly available dataset for handwritten Pashto digits before this study. Due to this, there was no work performed on the recognition of Pashto handwritten digits and characters combined. To achieve this objective, a dataset of Pashto handwritten digits consisting of 60,000 images was created. The trio deep learning Convolutional Neural Network, i.e., CNN, LeNet, and Deep CNN were trained and tested with both Pashto handwritten characters and digits datasets. From the simulations, the Deep CNN achieved 99.42 percent accuracy for Pashto handwritten digits, 99.17 percent accuracy for handwritten characters, and 70.65 percent accuracy for combined digits and characters. Similarly, LeNet and CNN models achieved slightly less accuracies (LeNet, 98.82, 99.15, and 69.82 percent and CNN, 98.30, 98.74, and 66.53 percent) for Pashto handwritten digits, Pashto characters, and the combined Pashto digits and characters recognition datasets, respectively. Based on these results, the Deep CNN model is the best model in terms of accuracy and loss as compared to the other two models.

This research reviewed the different steganography techniques used to hide secrets within Arabic text. In this paper, we aim to provide an overview of Arabic text steganography techniques from literature and previous studies that used Arabic language. Due to the rapid development in steganography techniques and different medium used to hide secrets and send it over internet, review the Arabic text steganography is important. Hiding text within Arabic language is the art of invisible communication to keep the information confidentiality due to the unique characteristics and features of Arabic language. Arabic text Steganography technique has many benefits that can be further used for Arabic-similar languages or any languages written in Arabic letters such as Pashto language (the official of Afghanistan language), Persian language (the official of Iran language) and Urdu language (the official of Pakistan language). Nevertheless, many Arabic text steganography techniques have been introduced in Arabic, some of which will be covered in this paper.

The paper presents a study of usability of x-vectors for adaptation of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. X-vectors are Neural Network (NN)-based speaker embeddings recently proposed in speaker recognition (SR). They quickly replaced common i-vectors and became new state-of-the-art technique. Here, the same approach is adopted for ASR with the hope of similar outcome. All experiments were done on ASR for the latest IARPA MATERIAL evaluation running on Pashto language. Over 1% absolute improvement was observed with x-vectors over traditional i-vectors, even when the x-vector extractor was not trained on target Pashto data.

Aim: This study examined how psychosocial characteristics might relate to adherence to democratic values among young and older people within two different cultural contexts in Afghanistan. Method: Self-report questionnaires were employed to measure empathy, theory of mind, gender role equality, openness to experiences, suggestibility, authoritarianism and support for democracy. A sample of 669 people from younger (18–25 years) and older (45 years and above) age groups from different cultural backgrounds in Afghanistan participated in the study. A series of MANOVAs were conducted to examine the cultural (Dari, Pashto), generational and gender differences on the study variables. Dari and Pashto speakers showed equal degrees of support for authoritarianism regardless of age difference. Results: The findings reveal that Dari speakers scored more highly on empathy, theory of mind, openness, gender role equality, democratic values and lower on suggestibility than Pashto speakers. Older Pashtun participants had lower scores on theory of mind than their younger counterparts. Hierarchical multiple regression analysis yields that gender role equality, openness and suggestibility predict support for democracy with gender role equality being the strongest predictor. Conclusion: The knowledge gained here would potentially be incorporated into the development of practical guidelines to be used by policy makers, education systems and the media to facilitate the process of democratization.

Formal definition of a natural language lets computers understand it; the languages have challenging complexity to come under representation of any formal language. Modeling assumptions, using formal languages, we can approximate the languages; and better approximation we do, more complexities of formal languages are resolved. Objective is to study current researches and possibilities to model Dari as a context-free language. Researchers have worked for more than 6 decades on definition of syntax of natural languages using context-free grammer. It is crucial that computer scientists to be able to thoroughly understand about which category of formal languages the natural language exist in in. In overall, our skill to decide the grammar type of natural languages performs a significant role in our capability to parse it. This review article concludes that discussed issue of the context-freeness of a certain language is regularly reliant on upon the level of complexity of the language. The common of languages investigated in this regard are languages of European family and Indo-Aryan languages liker Dari, Arabic and Pashto have not been adequately fortunate to be devoted thorough researches in this regard.

The present research work intends to analyze and compare the sentence structures in English and Pashto Language. The researcher has focused mainly on the passivization process in this regard. The primary reason for the research is to highlight the similarities and differences between the passivization processes in both languages. Moreover, the researcher has delimited the study to tenses used in both the languages. The study follows qualitative method of research where the researcher has collected the data for the English passivization from the various grammar books while for the collection of data in the form of Pashto passive structures, the researcher has used test as research tools. The researcher has compared the passivization process in each tense between English and Pashto in the data analysis chapter. The study highlighted some similarities but many differences in the passivization process in English and Pashto languages.

Pakistan is home to diverse multilingual practices. However, these practices have not been extensively explored. This paper unpacks the interactive practices of a group of students in a university in Pakistan from the perspective of translanguaging. In particular, the paper examines the languages students use in informal class discussions in a university setting and explores their motivations for using different languages within this setting. Data collected through observations, video-recording and semi-structured interviews were ethnographically analysed. The findings indicate that although the Medium of Instruction at the university is English, the students displayed unconscious use of translanguaging in their discussions of mainly English and Pashto (their native language), and some Urdu (the national language).