A Study of the Relationship Between the Pashto Language and Indo-Aryan Languages

Abstract

Pashto is a historic language of the northeastern subgroup of the Aryan branch within the Indo-European language family. Based on its phonological, morphological, and syntactic features, it is directly descended from its parent Aryan language and is coexistent in origin with Avesta and Sanskrit. Within the Indo-European family, Pashto has well-maintained grammatical features of both Aryan and Indo-Aryan languages; therefore, it has at times been considered either Aryan or Indo-Aryan. Due to the presence of certain shared linguistic features with Indo-Aryan languages, some orientalists, local historians, researchers, and even some Pashtuns themselves have at various times classified Pashto among Semitic, Indo-Aryan, or Aryan languages. This study demonstrates that Pashto, as an independent earliest Aryan language, has directly grown from the Aryan parental language. Owing to geographical proximity and contact with Indo-Aryan languages, it has incorporated certain phonological and morphological features of those languages into its structure and has also borrowed a number of lexical items from them. Since this research is limited to examining the position and relationship of Pashto with Indo-Aryan languages, the findings expose that Pashto has assumed some phonetic characteristics and linguistic principles of Indo-Aryan languages and combined them into its own system. As a qualitative study, the collected data have been analyzed and interpreted through a comparative approach.