| Description | Pashto is an Indo-Iranian language and is one of two
nationally official languages in Afghanistan and one of
five regionally recognised languages in Pakistan. The
romanization system presented here may be applied to all
Pashto geographical names. Although the BGN/PCGN policy for
geographical names in Afghanistan is to apply the BGN/PCGN
national system of romanization for Afghanistan (2007),
which incorporates Dari elements, when applied to a Pashto
geographical name, the romanized results of the BGN/PCGN
national system for Afghanistan are the same as those of
this Pashto romanization system1 . The Pashto alphabet uses
a modified form of the Perso-Arabic script, and contains
twelve additional consonants not present in standard
Arabic, as well as three additional vowel characters and an
additional vowel point. ڼ گ ښ ژ ږ ړ ډ ځ څ چ ټ پ :Consonants
ٙ :Point Vowel; ې ۍ ى :Vowels The points used in Arabic to
mark short vowels and certain other diacritical marks are
not written in Pashto. Consequently, a reference source may
sometimes be required to aid correct identification of the
standard spellings and proper vowels and elimination of
dialectal and idiosyncratic variations. In the interests of
clarity, a column showing vowel pointing from Arabic to
indicate short vowels has been included in the examples
below, alongside the unpointed form that will usually be
encountered. However it should be noted that the
pronunciation of short vowels will vary. (Note: it is
recommended that a font such as Scheherazade, available
from www.sil.org, which includes the Unicode extended
Arabic sub-range, be used to view this system2 .)
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