Open Pashto-English Dictionary: A gateway to Afghanistan’s history and dialectology
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Welcome to the website of the Open Pashto-English Dictionary, an ongoing lexicographical project (1 January 2023 – 30 June 2025) funded by the Austrian Academy of Sciences's go!digital 3.0 programme and housed at the Austrian Academy of Sciences (Institute of Iranian Studies & Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage) and the University of Vienna (Institute of European and Comparative Literature and Language Studies, Department of Finno-Ugric Studies).
Principal investigators: Jeremy Bradley, Veronika Milanova
Consultant: Julian Kreidl
More information on our project will follow in the due course of time.
This project creates an online dictionary of Pashto for both the academic and speaker communities (Pashto speakers in Afghanistan and Pakistan as well as in the global diaspora), including professionals such as translators and interpreters. While core data comes from Aslanov’s Pashto-Russian dictionary (1985), we will add a sizable number of lemmas from other sources including academic papers as well as our own fieldwork with native speakers. This way, we make sure that our dictionary contains the necessary neologisms describing recent technological, political and societal developments which are ubiquitous in contemporary Pashto media. Additionally, in the course of our fieldwork with native speakers from both Afghanistan and Pakistan we have been able to acquire knowledge about semantic nuances, slang and dialectal expressions which were absent from previous dictionaries.
We put emphasis on both technical and colloquial vocabulary which has not been recorded in previous dictionaries (offline or online). “Technical terminology” as we define it here means neologisms (for diverse material and immaterial innovations of the 21st century) which are commonly found in Pashto traditional and social media but are missing from even the newest dictionaries. “Colloquial vocabulary” not only covers dialectal vocabulary but also everyday lexemes and phrases which previous lexicographers failed to include, either because the scholars were unaware of them or because the exclusion was deliberate. For both domains, we will rely on our fieldwork and especially on input from the community, including translators who are often struggling to find Pashto equivalents for legal terms and other technical terminology.
Every entry consists of short grammatical information and dialectal classification for the lemma as well as an English translation. The grammatical information includes the nominal class of a given noun or adjective, which tells the user how a nominal is declined properly. Given the complex nominal declension of Pashto, it is of crucial importance for a user to know how a given noun forms, e.g., its oblique singular or direct (nominative) plural. A table with the nominal classes with example paradigms is provided on the website. German translations and information on a word’s origin are included if they are contained in our sources; both aspects will be strengthened in future continuations of the project. For words subject to unusually large dialectal variation, we include audio recordings from different native speakers.