LANGUAGES

Languages: Pashto 50 %, Afghan Persian (Dari) 35 %, Turkic languages (primarily Uzbek and Turkmen) 11 %, 30 Minor languages (primarily Balochi and Pashai) 4 %.  There is a lot of bilingualism.

DARI - Dari is a member of the Iranian branch of the Indo-Iranian family of languages; it is, along with Pashto, one of the two official languages of Afghanistan. Dari is the Afghan dialect of Farsi (Persian). It is written in a modified Arabic alphabet and it has many Arabic and Persian loanwords. The Syntax of Dari does not differ greatly from Farsi, but the stress accent is less prominent in Dari than in Farsi. To mark attribution, Dari uses the suffix 'ra'.  The vowel system of Dari differs from the Farsi, and Dari also has additional consonants. About 1/3rd of the population of Afghanistan, which is about 5,000,000 people (Tajik, Uzbek, Turkman, Hazara and most Pashtoons) speak Dari. It is the primary language of the Tajik, Hazara and Aimak people. Dari, rather than Pashto, serves as the mean of communication between speakers of different or many languages in Afghanistan.

PASHTO - According to research, Pashto is one of the most ancient languages of the world.  It has been spoken from the Hindu Kush hills in the south west of Asia to the bank of the River Indus for thousands of years and is believed to be almost four thousand years old.

BALOUCHI - Also spelled Balochi, Beluchi or Baluchi, is a modern Iranian language of the Indo-Iranian group of the Indo-European language family. Balouchi speakers live mainly in an area now composed of parts of southeastern Iran and southwestern Pakistan; an area that was once the historic region of Balouchistan. They also live in Central Asia (near Merv, Turkmenistan) and southwestern Afghanistan. There are also colonies of them in Oman, southern Arabia, and along the east coast of Africa as far south as Kenya. Balouchi is a western Iranian language that is closely relates to Kurdish. Despite the vast area over which it is spoken, its six dialects (Rakhshani, Sarawani, Kechi, Lotuni, the Eastern Hill dialects, and the coastal dialects) are all believed to be mutually intelligible. There are an estimated 4,800,000 worldwide Balouchi speakers, who are mostly in Afghanistan, Iran, Oman and Pakistan.

TURKIC - Group of closely related language is that from a subfamily of Altaic languages. The Turkic languages show close similarities to each other in phonology, morphology and syntax -- though Chuvash, Khalaj and Yakut differ considerably from the rest. The earliest linguistic records are Old Turkic inscriptions, found near the Orhon River of Mongolia and the Yenisy River valley in south-central Russia, which date from the 8th century AD.