Phonological and Morphological Analysis on Peshawar Dialect of Pashto

埼玉県越谷市Pashto, one of the official languages of Afghanistan, belongs to the Eastern group within the Iranian branch of Indo-European family of languages. It has been long recognized also as the most important language of the North-West Frontier Province in Pakistan. An estimated number of Pashto speakers in Afghanistan and Pakistan is approximately 25 million. Although many features vary widely in Pashto and few of their isoglosses coincide, it can be divided into the two major varieties on the basis of the phonemic and phonological features. The two groups are "Soft Pashto", or southwestern dialects spoken around Kandahar, and "Hard Pashto", or northeastern dialects spoken around Peshawar. Characteristic of Hard Pashto are the two phonemes, velar /x/ and /g/, respectively corresponding to retroflex spirants /s[下付きの点あり]/ and /z[下付きの点あり]/ in Soft Pashto. In this paper, focused on Peshawar dialect that has been most directly exposed to Indo-Aryan influence, e.g. Urdu and Punjabi, some of phonological and morphological features of this dialect are presented such as Indo-Aryanised phonemic system and inflections of nouns, personal pronouns and adjectives