by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2007/06/15 03:16 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2007/06/15/3302680.aspx
I have talked a lot about Language Interface Packs for Windows XP here in this blog.
And now after having covered Mapudungun, اردو, Inuktitut, മലയാളം, Qhichwa Simi, فارسی, isiZulu, ಕನ್ನಡ, नेपाली, Afrikaans, कोंकणी, Setswana, বাংলা, తెలుగు, ਪੰਜਾਬੀ, Lëtzebuergisch, татарча, Nynorsk, ქართული, Հայերեն, and Azərbaycan dili, I can proudly say that there is just one left to talk about.
And that one is the Pashto Language Interface Pack, how available right here!
Some background info about Pashto, via Soren:
Number of speakers: 17-26 million
Name in the language itself: پښتو
Pashto is one of the two official languages of Afghanistan (along with Dari). It is spoken there by 8 to 15 million speakers and also in the Northwest Frontier Province of Pakistan by around 9 million speakers (13% of the population). These figures are very rough estimates, mainly because there has not been a census in Afghanistan for decades, the number of Afghan refugees in the western provinces of Pakistan is not known and many Pashto speakers lead a migratory lifestyle not allowing for accurate censuses anyways. Major Pashto speaking cities, however, are Kabul and Kandahar in Afghanistan and Peshawar in Pakistan.
While in Pakistan Pashto has no official status, it is an official language in Afghanistan since 1936 and used as an administrative language, especially due to the political dominance of Pashtuns in the central government. It still has a lower prestige than Dari, the variant of Persian spoken in northern and western Afghanistan, which is also more widely used in business and education.
There are two main dialects: Southwestern Pashto is spoken in Afghanistan, Northeastern Pashto in Pakistan.
Fun facts:
- The oldest borrowed words in Pashto are from the Greek language - they date back from Alexander the Great's conquests and the Hellenistic state of Bactria (which covered parts of today's Afghanistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan).
- Pashto has an extremely rich folk literature. There are thousands of two and four line folk poems, traditionally composed by women and reflecting their everyday life.
Not-so-fun facts:
Classification: Pashto belongs to the East Iranian sub-group of the Indo-Iranian languages which in turn form are branch of the Indo-European languages. East Iranian and West Iranian (which includes Persian) are major sub-groups of the Iranian group; Iranian forms the Indo-Iranian branch together with Indo-Aryan, a group of many languages spoken on the Indian subcontinent (such as Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Punjabi or Urdu).
Script: Since the late 16th century, Pashto has been written with a modified variant of the Persian script which in turn is a variant of the Arabic script.
Enjoy!
This post brought to you by پ (U+067e, a.k.a. ARABIC LETTER PEH)
Tony on 2 Mar 2010 9:43 AM:
Where can I get the DARI language pack??? I found the Pashto easy enough, but I really need Dari.
Michael S. Kaplan on 2 Mar 2010 10:54 AM:
There is no Dari language pack or language interface pack for XP.
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