Pashto

High school (ages 12+)
People & Society

Name:

Date:

Step 1 · Read the article

Open the article and read it at the level above. Then answer the questions below in your own words.

https://smallwhale.org/articles/pashto

Write what each word means, using the article.

Do not copy the article. Write two things you learned, the way you would explain them to a friend.

Answers below are taken from the article’s stored facts, so they match what the student read.

1. How big is Pashto?Afghanistan (official language) and Pakistan (Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, parts of Balochistan)
2. What is the language family classification?Eastern Iranian language, part of the Indo-European language family
3. What is the estimated native speaker population?Approximately 50 million individuals
4. What is Pashto and where is it spoken?Pashto is a very old language spoken by about 50 million people. It is mainly used in Afghanistan, where it is an official language, and in Pakistan, especially in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.
5. Why does Pashto use a special script?Pashto uses a modified Perso-Arabic script that adds extra letters and dots. These additions help write sounds that Arabic does not have, like special retroflex consonants.

Lingua Franca: A common language used by speakers of different native languages to communicate.
Orthography: The conventional spelling system of a language.
Phoneme: The smallest unit of sound in a language that can distinguish one word from another.
Lexical: Relating to the words or vocabulary of a language.