World Language Map

Where is Southern Pashto spoken?

Southern Pashto is an Indo-European language, spoken in Pakistan, Afghanistan, the United Arab Emirates, Iran and 2 more. It is marked on the map by a ringed point.

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Key

Language families (largest ten)

  • Atlantic-Congo
  • Austronesian
  • Sino-Tibetan
  • Indo-European
  • Afro-Asiatic
  • Nuclear Trans New Guinea
  • Otomanguean
  • Austroasiatic
  • Tai-Kadai
  • Pama-Nyungan

Everything else

  • All other families Smaller families, isolates and unclassified languages.
  • Point A language with no area map. The dot sits at its Glottolog position, in its family colour.

How to read the map. Each colour is a language family: a group of languages that share a common ancestor. The ten largest families have their own colour and every other family is grey. Areas are see-through, so where two languages share a place the colours mix. Tap anywhere to list every language whose area covers that spot. Areas are generalisations drawn from published atlases, many of them decades old, and cities are multilingual, so an area never says that everyone there speaks the language. A dot marks a language that has no area map. The family name is always given in words, because colour alone is hard to tell apart for some people.

Where Southern Pashto is spoken

Southern Pashto is spoken in 6 countries: Pakistan, Afghanistan, the United Arab Emirates, Iran and 2 more. The table gives the share of each country’s people who speak it, from Unicode CLDR, where CLDR has a figure.

CountryShare of populationEstimated speakers
Pakistan16%40,378,240
Afghanistan43%17,252,288
United Arab Emirates2.9%290,934
Iran0.2%141,419
TajikistanNot givenNot given
TurkmenistanNot givenNot given

Estimated speakers are the CLDR percentage applied to CLDR’s own population figure for the country, so they are rough. A country without a figure may still have speakers: it is listed because the language area, or Glottolog’s record, reaches it.

Southern Pashto has no area on the map because no open area map covers it. The ringed point is the position Glottolog gives for the language.

How many people speak Southern Pashto?

Wikidata gives about 10.9 million first-language speakers (Ethnologue, 2019). These figures are approximate: they come from different sources, years and definitions of a speaker.

Status: Not endangered. Glottolog lists it as not endangered: it is still being passed on to children.

Where Southern Pashto sits in the language family tree

Glottolog classifies Southern Pashto as follows, from the largest family down to the language itself.

  1. Indo-European
  2. Classical Indo-European
  3. Indo-Iranian
  4. Iranian-Nuristani
  5. Iranian
  6. Pashto
  7. Nuclear Pashto
  8. Southern Pashto

Related languages

Other languages in the Nuclear Pashto group:

More about Southern Pashto

Codes: ISO 639-3 pbt, Glottolog sout2649. Glottolog macroarea: Eurasia.

Questions about Southern Pashto

Where is Southern Pashto spoken?

Southern Pashto is spoken in Pakistan, Afghanistan, the United Arab Emirates, Iran and 2 more. Unicode CLDR puts it at 16% of the population of Pakistan, which is about 40,378,240 people. On the map it is shown as a single point, because no open area map covers it.

How many people speak Southern Pashto?

Wikidata gives about 10.9 million first-language speakers (Ethnologue, 2019). Speaker numbers are approximate and differ between sources: counting who is a speaker, and whether to include second-language speakers, is not settled.

Which language family is Southern Pashto in?

Glottolog places Southern Pashto in the Indo-European family, in the branch Classical Indo-European, Indo-Iranian, Iranian-Nuristani, Iranian, Pashto and Nuclear Pashto.

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