Pashayi languages

Pashayi
Pashai
زبان پشه‌ای (Dari)
پشه اې ژبه (Pashto)
Pashayi in Nastaliq
Native toAfghanistan
EthnicityPashayi
Native speakers
(400,000 cited 2000–2011)
Arabic script (Nastaliq)
Language codes
ISO 639-3Variously:
aee – Northeastern
glh – Northwestern
psi – Southeastern
psh – Southwestern
Glottologpash1270
Linguasphere59-AAA-a
Linguistic map of Afghanistan; Pashayi is spoken in the purple area in the east.
Pashayi is classified as Vulnerable by the UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger

Pashayi (or Pashai) is a group of Indo-Aryan languages spoken by the Pashayi people in parts of the Kapisa, Laghman, Nangarhar, Nuristan, Kunar, and Kabul (Surobi) provinces in northeastern Afghanistan.

The Pashayi languages had no known written form prior to 2003. There are four mutually unintelligible varieties, with only about a 30% lexical similarity:

A grammar of the language was written as a doctoral dissertation in 2014.

Phonology

Consonants

Pashayi consonants: 70 
Labial Dental/
Alveolar		 Palato-
alveolar		 Retroflex Dorsal Glottal
Nasal m n ɳ ŋ
Plosive voiceless p t̪ ʈ k
voiced b d̪ ɖ ɡ
Affricate voiceless t͡ʃ
voiced d͡ʒ
Fricative voiceless s ʃ (ʂ) x (h)
voiced z ʒ (ʐ) ɣ
lateral ɬ
Rhotic tap ɾ ɽ
trill r
Approximant lateral l
central ʋ ~ w j

Vowels

Pashayi vowels: 91 
Front Central Back
High i u
Mid e eː o oː
Low a aː

Further reading

References

  1. 1 2 Northeastern at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015) (subscription required)
    Northwestern at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015) (subscription required)
    Southeastern at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015) (subscription required)
    Southwestern at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015) (subscription required)
  2. ↑ Masica, Colin P. (1991). The Indo-Aryan Languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 440.
  3. ↑ Yun, Ju-Hong (2003). Pashai Language Development Project: Promoting Pashai language, literacy and community development (PDF). Conference on language development, language revitalization and multilingual education in minority communities in Asia. 6–8 November 2003. Bangkok, Thailand. Archived from the original (PDF) on 5 November 2018. Retrieved 5 November 2018.
  4. 1 2 3 4 Lehr, Rachel (2014). A Descriptive Grammar of Pashai: The Language and Speech Community of Darrai Nur (PhD thesis). University of Chicago. ISBN 978-1-321-22417-7. ProQuest 1620321674.