English to Pashto Translation

English to Pashto translation connects English with Pashto (پښتو), the language of the Pashtun people and one of the two official languages of Afghanistan. Pashto has roughly 40 to 60 million native speakers, mainly in southern and eastern Afghanistan and in Pakistan's Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and northern Balochistan, with large communities in the Gulf states, the UK, the USA, and Germany. It belongs to the Eastern Iranian branch of the Indo-European family, which makes it structurally very different from English. Pashto is written right to left in an Arabic-based script derived from Persian, with extra letters for sounds Arabic lacks, such as ټ ډ ړ ڼ for retroflex sounds, ښ and ږ for the sounds written "kh/x" and "g" in many romanizations, and څ ځ for the "ts" and "dz" sounds. Because of this, English text must be rendered carefully into a right-to-left layout. Two main dialect groups exist: the southern (Kandahari) form, which pronounces ښ as "sh" or "kh" variants and is the base of most Afghan broadcasting, and the northern (Peshawari or Yusufzai) form common in Pakistan. Written Pashto is largely the same for both, but spoken pronunciation differs. The grammar also differs sharply from English. Pashto verbs usually come at the end of the sentence, nouns have grammatical gender, and the past tense uses a split-ergative pattern in which the verb agrees with the object rather than the subject. Word-for-word translation can therefore sound unnatural, and short, clear English sentences give the best results. People use this pair to communicate with family and colleagues, to read news and official notices, to support humanitarian, NGO, and journalism work in Afghanistan and Pakistan, to help refugees and new arrivals with forms and appointments, and to learn basic Pashto before travel. Our free tool gives instant machine translation with no signup. Review important or official text with a fluent speaker before relying on it.