Persian loanwords and calques in Pashto

Pashto (Pakhto), called also Afghan, from the East-Iranian languages group, is spoken by Pashtuns living in Afghanistan and Pakistan. In Afghanistan it is, along with Persian from the West-Iranian languages group, one of two official languages.The position of these two languages in Afghanistan was and remains different. Persian is the language of the city, of many ethnic and social groups like craftsmen and it was the language of the Court, belles-lettres and high culture. Pashto, by contrast, spoken by one ethnic group - Pashtuns - is the language of shepherds, wanderers, warriors. These two languages, describing two realities, have nevertheless shared some elements of their lexical (though rarely grammatical) variety, and in so doing have helped Afghans to depict their world.The main aim of this paper is to present the place and character of some Persian loanwords and calques in Pashto. This very interesting issue has been largely neglected. The article has four major sections: the introduction (0) places the role of Pashto in Afghanistan, past and present; the first part (1) describes the aim of article, Pashto and Persian transcription rules, some loanwords phonetic changes, and the matter of loanwords grammatical gender in Pashto; the second part (2) discusses lexical loanwords (divided into sixteen groups) and grammatical one (prefix, suffixes, compounds elements etc.); the third part (3) looks at some calques. The last part (4) draws some conclusions about the linguistic material under examination.