پښتو
Lingo7 lets you read books with a translation under every sentence in 49 languages. Pashto is not one of them yet. Ask for it below, and see what adding it takes and what reading Pashto involves.
Lingo7 does not read Pashto yet: the app has no Pashto dictionary, audio or books, and its reader still has to be mirrored for right-to-left text. You can vote for Pashto here. Leave your email to vote; we add the most requested languages first and write to you once, when Pashto is ready.
We add the most requested languages first. Leave your email and we'll write to you once, when Pashto is ready.
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The demo below is the live reader with a German book. Pashto would work the same way once it is added.
Spoken in: Afghanistan; northwestern Pakistan (Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, northern Balochistan)
Pashto is written right to left in its own version of the Perso-Arabic alphabet, with 45 letters. It adds letters that Persian and Arabic lack: the retroflex ټ, ډ, ړ and ڼ, marked with a small ring, and ښ, ږ, ځ and څ. A reader of Persian or Urdu recognizes most of the page but has to learn these new shapes. Short vowels are usually left out, but Pashto writes more vowels with letters than Persian does, using ې, ۍ and ئ among others.
The written standard is shared, while the main dialects pronounce some letters differently. ښ is said close to sh in Kandahar and as kh around Peshawar, which is why the name of the language, پښتو, is heard as Pashto in the south and Pakhto in the north-east. Spelling conventions also differ between Afghanistan and Pakistan, in word endings, in spacing within compounds and in how loanwords are written, so the same word is not always spelled the same way in texts from the two countries.
Pashto has a strong tradition of poetry. The landay, a folk couplet of nine and thirteen syllables, is traditionally sung aloud, and Rahman Baba and Khushal Khan Khattak, both 17th-century poets, are counted among the most popular in the language. For everyday reading, BBC Pashto publishes news in the standard written language, and StoryWeaver, a free online library, has around a hundred illustrated children's stories in Pashto.
Our free tools cover the 49 languages in the app.
There is no date yet. We add the most requested languages first, and Pashto needs the work described on this page. Leave your email in the form and we will write to you once, when Pashto is ready.
Not yet. Lingo7 has no Pashto dictionary, audio or shelf of books, so a Pashto book would not get the sentence-by-sentence translation and word lookups the app is built on. The 49 languages it does read are listed on the home page.
One vote per email address per language. The count on this page shows a number once at least 10 people have asked, and refreshes within a minute of a new vote. Your email is stored only to tell you when Pashto launches, and deleted whenever you ask at support@lingoseven.com.
It uses the same Perso-Arabic base and runs right to left, but the Pashto alphabet has 45 letters, several of which Persian lacks. Urdu writes its retroflex sounds with a small ط above the letter (ٹ ڈ ڑ), while Pashto uses a small ring (ټ ډ ړ). A reader of either can sound out much of a Pashto text after learning the extra letters, although the vocabulary is different.
Because of one letter. The name is written پښتو, and ښ is pronounced close to sh in the southern dialect of Kandahar and as kh in the north-eastern dialect of Peshawar. Both groups write the word the same way.
A traditional folk poem of a single couplet, with nine syllables in the first line and thirteen in the second, usually sung. Landays deal with love, grief, homeland, war and separation, and many are anonymous.