POSSIBLE EFFECTS OF LATE ANTIQUE IRANIAN DIALECTS OF GANDHARA ON THE MAJOR NORTHERN PASHTO DIALECT OF PESHAWAR VALLEY

It is known that various parallel dialects of Middle Persian were spoken in the Gandhara (Peshawar Valley and peripheries, extending from Kabulistan and Laghman in the west to Hazara and Kashmir in the east, and Swat-Buner in the north. These were spoken by various dominant minority Persian communities resident in the area who later came to be identified as Tajiks. Among them were the Dehqani language attributed to the Shalmanis, and Laghmani spoken by Dehqans in Laghman. The Sawadis (Swatis) originally spoke “Gabari” or Zoroastrian Dari, a dialect still extant in Yazd and Kerman of modern Iran — the ancestral regions of Swati tradition. Not only are these languages mentioned in local historical traditions — but even British colonial explorers of the region have referred to presence of various related traces and effects being present here as late as 100 years ago.

Gabari was parallel to Middle Persian or Parsig which seems to have left a profound but forgotten impression on the kind of Pashto now spoken in Peshawar Valley.....nowadays known as the Eastern Sarabani Pashto — which is the most developed and standardised dialect of the Pashto spoken in Pakistan, and belongs to the “northern” dialectical subdivision of the language (as opposed to the Qandahari or southern). The Eastern Sarabani Afghans now populating Peshawar Valley all actually originated in Qandahar but do not now speak the present day Qandahari dialect. This is an extremely important fact to which no attention is paid. Either that, or the Pashto spoken in Qandahar 500 years ago was different, the possibility being that the Peshawari Parsig-related Pashto was somehow extant in Sistan (Kandahar) alongside other dialects and was brought by them here -- but it could be that it was adopted by them after their arrival here 500 years ago.

A related but interesting puzzle is that of the four “transpositional consonants” peculiar to the Pashto Perso-Arabic script which is said to have been formulated for the dominant northern dialect 450 years ago by the Barki mystic “Pir Rokhan [or Roshan]” (Bayazid Ansari) who tried to fill the political vacuum in the northeast Afghan region/Gandhara area following the fall of the Swati monarchy and the Eastern Sarabani invasions. Bayazid was not a Pashtun and was from the Barki community who speak their own Iranian Urmari language — and who are believed to have been a local ruling class in the days before Islam. Nowadays called Tahiks, they traditionally regard thrmselves as “Kurds”. These four special letters are used to replace certain consonantal sounds in borrowed words and terms of Persian and Indian origin in the Northern or “hard” variety of Pashto:

Not only did Pir Rokhan’s outwardly Islamic mystic philosophy contain several elements of old Iranic Mithraic practices that seemed to be well remembered in his time, but it seems that Pir Rokhan was also conversant with the effects of ancient Middle Persian upon the local Pashto and designed these special four transpositional consonants for use in accordance with grammatical and linguistic rules and conventions of the time that have now been totally forgotten.

Pashto is known to have a Saka basis, with an agglomerationof diverse Bactrian, Sogdian, Dardic and Indic influences pervading it. Avestan and other forms of ancient Persian have also lent strong tinges of varying nature. Despite state-level efforts to promote and improve it over the last 100 years, Pashto still remains a crude backwater language fractured into a diverse array of non-standardised dialects accross diverse modes of differentiation — with some versions being more refined than others.