The 'Pashto' language is spoken mainly in:

Pashto (Pakhto) is the language of the Pashtun people (also known as Pathans or Afghans). It is spoken by tens of millions of people mainly in:

Afghanistan: Pashto is one of the two official languages of the country, along with Dari (a form of Persian). Pashtuns are the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan.

Pakistan: It is spoken mainly in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province (formerly the North-West Frontier Province) and in parts of Balochistan. In fact, more Pashto speakers live in Pakistan than in Afghanistan.

Iran: There are small Pashto-speaking communities, mainly in the east, near the Afghan border.

Smaller Pashtun communities also live in India, the Gulf countries and elsewhere.

Language facts:

Pashto belongs to the Eastern Iranian branch of the Indo-Iranian languages, which are part of the Indo-European family. So it is distantly related to Persian, Hindi and Sanskrit.

It is written in a modified form of the Perso-Arabic script, with extra letters for its special sounds.

It has two main dialects, a soft "Pashto" in the south (Kandahar) and a hard "Pakhto" in the north (Peshawar).

Famous Pashto poets include Khushal Khan Khattak (17th century), who is called the national poet of the Pashtuns, and Rahman Baba, a Sufi poet.

In Indian history, Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, called "Frontier Gandhi" or "Badshah Khan", was a Pashtun leader of the freedom movement. He founded the non-violent "Khudai Khidmatgar" (Servants of God) movement, also called the "Red Shirts". He received the Bharat Ratna in 1987, the first non-Indian citizen to receive it.

Why not the other options?

• ✗Iran, Iraq and Syria mainly speak Persian, Arabic and Kurdish.
• ✗Nepal, Bhutan and Tibet speak Nepali, Dzongkha and Tibetan.
• ✗Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan speak Turkic languages.