Pashtuns

For the Pashtun language, see Pashto.

Pashtuns
پښتانه (Pəx̌tānə́) masc.
پښتنې (Pəx̌tané) fem.
Total population
c. 60–70 million[1][2][3]
Regions with significant populations
 Pakistan38,864,994 (2024)[a][4][b]
 Afghanistanc. 18.4–26.3 million (2025)[c][6][7][8][9]
United Arab Emirates578,315 (2021)[10]
United States279,628 (2024)[11]
 Iran176,000 (2022)[12][13]
United Kingdom50,597 (2021)[14][15][16]
Germany48,000 (2023)[17]
 Tajikistan32,400 (2017)[18]
 Canada31,700 (2021)[19]
 India21,677 (2011 census)[d][e][20]
 Russia19,800 (2015)[21]
Australia8,979 (2021)[22]
Languages
Pashto (in its different dialects: Wanetsi, Central Pashto, Southern Pashto, Northern Pashto),[23] Dari, Hindi-Urdu, Ormuri[24][25]
Religion
Predominantly Islam (mainly Sunni Islam)
Related ethnic groups
Other Iranian peoples

Pashtuns[f] (Pashto: پښتانه, Romanized: Pəx̌tānə́ (masc.);[g] پښتنې, Romanized: Pəx̌tané (fem.)[h][26]), also known as Pakhtuns,[27] Pukhtoons, or Pathans,[i] are a nomadic,[31][32][33] pastoral[34][35] Iranic ethnic group[27] primarily residing in southern and eastern Afghanistan and northwestern Pakistan.[36][37] They were historically referred to as Afghans[j] until 1964,[43][44] after the term's meaning had become a demonym for all citizens of Afghanistan, regardless of their ethnic group, creating an Afghan national identity.[43][45]

The Pashtuns speak the Pashto language, which belongs to the Eastern Iranian branch of the Iranian language family, the Wanetsi language, mainly among Pashtuns of the Tareen tribe, and Ormuri among non-Pashtun Ormur people and Wazir Pashtuns. Additionally, Dari serves as the second language of Pashtuns in Afghanistan,[46][47] while those in Pakistan speak Urdu and English.[24][48] In India, the majority of those of Pashtun descent have lost the ability to speak Pashto and instead speak Hindi and other regional languages,[49][25][50] while those in Iran primarily speak Southern Pashto, and Persian as a second language.

Pashtuns form the world's largest tribal society, comprising from 60–70 million people, and between 350–400 tribes with further having more sub-tribes, as well as a variety of origin theories.[51][52][53][54][55][56][57][58] In 2021, Shahid Javed Burki estimated the total Pashtun population to be situated between 60 and 70 million, with 15 million in Afghanistan.[1] Others who accept the 15 million figure include British academic Tim Willasey-Wilsey[2] as well as Abubakar Siddique, a journalist specializing in Afghan affairs.[3] This figure is disputed due to the lack of an official census in Afghanistan since 1979 due to continuing conflicts there.[59]

They are the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan and the second-largest ethnic group in Pakistan,[60] constituting around 42–47% of the total Afghan population and around 15.4% of the total Pakistani population[61][62][63][64] In India, significant and historical communities of the Pashtun diaspora exist in the northern region of Rohilkhand, as well as in major Indian cities such as Delhi and Mumbai.[65][66]

  1. ^ a b Shahid Javed Burki (13 September 2021). "The wandering Pashtuns". The Express Tribune. Archived from the original on 11 March 2025. Demographers estimated the world's Pashtun at 60–70 million of which the vast majority now live in Pakistan. Of Afghanistan's current population of 38 million, the Pashtun account for less than a majority — 15 million — or 39 per cent of the total.
  2. ^ a b Willasey-Wilsey, Tim (10 January 2023). "Tangled history: the Pashtun". Gateway House. There are 15 million Pashtuns in Afghanistan where they are the biggest and dominant ethnicity (...)
  3. ^ a b Siddique, Abubakar (January 2012). "Afghanistan's Ethnic Divides" (PDF). CIDOB Policy Research Project. There are some 15 million Pashtuns in Afghanistan (...)
  4. ^ "Pakistan". Central Intelligence Agency. 13 August 2025. Retrieved 14 August 2025 – via CIA.gov.
  5. ^ "Table 11: Population by Mother Tongue" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 5 October 2024. Retrieved 12 July 2025.
  6. ^ "Afghanistan". Minority Rights Group. Retrieved 5 May 2025. Main minority or indigenous communities: no reliable current data on ethnicity in Afghanistan exists, though surveys have pointed to some rough estimates of the population. However, previous estimates have put the population at Pashtun 42 per cent [...]
  7. ^ Brown, Keith; Sarah Ogilvie (2009). Concise encyclopedia of languages of the world. Elsevie. p. 845. ISBN 978-0-08-087774-7. Retrieved 24 September 2010. Pashto, which is mainly spoken south of the mountain range of the Hindu Kush, is reportedly the mother tongue of 60% of the Afghan population.
  8. ^ Hawthorne, Susan; Bronwyn Winter (2002). September 11, 2001: feminist perspectives. Spinifex Press. p. 225. ISBN 1-876756-27-6. Retrieved 24 September 2010. Over 60 percent of the population in Afghanistan is Pashtun [...]
  9. ^ "Afghanistan - Zahlen & Fakten" (in German). Der Fischer Weltalmanach 1969, 2019 (Frankfurt: S. Fischer Verlag). Retrieved 8 May 2025.
  10. ^ "United Arab Emirates: Demography" (PDF). Encyclopædia Britannica World Data. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. Retrieved 15 March 2008.
  11. ^ 50% of 348,945 Afghan-Americans = 174,473 and 15.4% of 684,438 Pakistani-Americans = 105,155. Total Afghan and Pakistani Pashtuns in USA = 279,628.
  12. ^ Project, Joshua. "Pashtun, Southern in Iran". joshuaproject.net. Retrieved 14 August 2025.
  13. ^ "Ethnologue report for Southern Pashto: Iran (2022)". Retrieved 17 November 2023.
  14. ^ "Ethnicity, Identity, Language and Religion, TS024 – Main language (detailed)". Office for National Statistics. 2023. Retrieved 4 August 2023.
  15. ^ "Scotland's Census 2022: write-in responses for Ethnicity, National Identity, Language and Religion topic". National Records of Scotland. 3 October 2024. Archived from the original on 25 January 2025.
  16. ^ "MS-B13 Main language – Full Detail". Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency. 22 September 2022. Archived from the original on 4 December 2024. Retrieved 4 August 2023.
  17. ^ "Bevölkerung mit Migrationshintergrund". Statistisches Bundesamt. Retrieved 14 August 2025.
  18. ^ "Ethnologue report for Southern Pashto: Tajikistan (2017)". Retrieved 17 November 2023.
  19. ^ "Knowledge of languages by age and gender: Canada, provinces and territories, census divisions and census subdivisions". Census Profile, 2021 Census. Statistics Canada Statistique Canada. 7 May 2021. Retrieved 3 January 2023.
  20. ^ "Census of India" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 24 July 2018. Retrieved 6 July 2025.
  21. ^ "Perepis.ru". perepis2002.ru (in Russian). Archived from the original on 16 January 2017. Retrieved 23 February 2014.
  22. ^ "Afghan – Population Statistics". Cultural Atlas. 1 January 2022. Retrieved 14 August 2025.
  23. ^ Khan, Ibrahim (7 September 2021). "Tarīno and Karlāṇi dialects". Pashto. 50 (661). ISSN 0555-8158. Archived from the original on 8 September 2021. Retrieved 8 September 2021.
  24. ^ a b Hakala, Walter N. (2012). "Languages as a Key to Understanding Afghanistan's Cultures" (PDF). National Geographic. Retrieved 13 March 2018. In the 1980s and '90s, at least three million Afghans—mostly Pashtun—fled to Pakistan, where a substantial number spent several years being exposed to Hindi- and Urdu-language media, especially Bollywood films and songs, and being educated in Urdu-language schools, both of which contributed to the decline of Dari, even among urban Pashtuns.
  25. ^ a b Green, Nile (2017). Afghanistan's Islam: From Conversion to the Taliban. University of California Press. p. 18. ISBN 978-0-520-29413-4. Many of the communities of ethnic Pashtuns (known as Pathans in India) that had emerged in India over the previous centuries lived peaceably among their Hindu neighbors. Most of these Indo-Afghans lost the ability to speak Pashto and instead spoke Hindi and Punjabi.
  26. ^ David, Anne Boyle (1 January 2014). Descriptive Grammar of Pashto and its Dialects. De Gruyter Mouton. p. 76. ISBN 978-1-61451-231-8.
  27. ^ a b Minahan, James B. (30 August 2012). Ethnic Groups of South Asia and the Pacific: An Encyclopedia. ABC-CLIO. ISBN 9781598846607.
  28. ^ James William Spain (1963). The Pathan Borderland. Mouton. p. 40. Retrieved 1 January 2012. The most familiar name in the west is Pathan, a Hindi term adopted by the British, which is usually applied only to the people living east of the Durand.
  29. ^ Pathan. World English Dictionary. Retrieved 1 January 2012. Pathan (pəˈtɑːn) – n a member of the Pashto-speaking people of Afghanistan, Western Pakistan, and elsewhere, most of whom are Muslim in religion [C17: from Hindi]
  30. ^ von Fürer-Haimendorf, Christoph (1985). Tribal populations and cultures of the Indian subcontinent. Handbuch der Orientalistik/2,7. Leiden: E. J. Brill. p. 126. ISBN 90-04-07120-2. OCLC 240120731. Retrieved 22 July 2019.
  31. ^ Lindisfarne, Nancy; Tapper, Nancy (23 May 1991). Bartered Brides: Politics, Gender and Marriage in an Afghan Tribal Society. Cambridge University Press. p. 29. ISBN 978-0-521-38158-1. As for the Pashtun nomads, passing the length of the region, they maintain a complex chain of transactions involving goods and information. Most important, each nomad household has a series of 'friends' in Uzbek, Aymak and Hazara villages along the route, usually debtors who take cash advances, animals and wool from them, to be redeemed in local produce and fodder over a number of years. Nomads regard these friendships as important interest-bearing investments akin to the lands some of them own in the same villages; recently villagers have sometimes withheld their dues, but relations between the participants are cordial, in spite of latent tensions and backbiting.
  32. ^ Rubin, Barnett R. (1 January 2002). The Fragmentation of Afghanistan: State Formation and Collapse in the International System. Yale University Press. p. 33. ISBN 978-0-300-09519-7. In some parts of Afghanistan, Pashtun nomads favored by the state often clashed with non- Pashtun (especially Hazara) peasants. Much of their pasture was granted to them by the state after being expropriated from conquered non-Pashtun communities. The nomads appear to have lost these pastures as the Hazaras gained autonomy in the recent war.___Nomads depend on peasants for their staple food, grain, while peasants rely on nomads for animal products, trade goods, credit, and information...Nomads are also ideally situated for smuggling. For some Baluch and Pashtun nomads, as well as settled tribes in border areas, smuggling has been a source of more income than agriculture or pastoralism. Seaso- nal migration patterns of nomads have been disrupted by war and state formation throughout history, and the Afghan-Soviet war was no exception.
  33. ^ Baiza, Yahia (21 August 2013). Education in Afghanistan: Developments, Influences and Legacies Since 1901. Routledge. p. 100. ISBN 978-1-134-12082-6. A typical issue that continues to disturb social order in Afghanistan even at the present time (2012) concerns the Pashtun nomads and grazing lands. Throughout the period 1929 78, governments supported the desire of the Pashtun nomads to take their cattle to graze in Hazara regions. Kishtmand writes that when Daoud visited Hazaristan in the 1950s. where the majority of the population are Hazaras, the local people com- plained about Pashtun nomads bringing their cattle to their grazing lands and destroying their harvest and land. Daoud responded that it was the right of the Pashtuns to do so and that the land belonged to them (Kishtmand 2002: 106).
  34. ^ Clunan, Anne; Trinkunas, Harold A. (10 May 2010). Ungoverned Spaces: Alternatives to State Authority in an Era of Softened Sovereignty. Stanford University Press. p. 101. ISBN 978-0-8047-7012-5. In 1846, the British sought to segregate settled areas on the frontier from the pastoral Pashtun communities found in the surrounding hills." British au- thorities made no attempt "to advance into the highlands, or even to secure the main passages through the mountains such as the Khyber Pass."2" In addition, the Close Border Policy tried to contract services from more resistant hill tribes in an attempt to co-opt them. In exchange for their cooperation, the tribes would receive a stipend for their services.
  35. ^ Banuazizi, Ali; Weiner, Myron (1 August 1988). The State, Religion, and Ethnic Politics: Afghanistan, Iran, and Pakistan. Syracuse University Press. p. 95. ISBN 978-0-8156-2448-6. The Hazaras, who rebelled and fought an extended war against the Afghan government, were stripped of their control over the Hindu Kush pastures and the pastures were given to the Pashtun pastoralists. This had a devastating impact on the Hazara's society and economy. These pastures had been held in common by the various regional Hazara groups and so had provided important bases for large "tribal" affiliations to be maintained. With the loss of their sum- mer pastures the units of practical Hazara affiliation declined. Also, Hazara leaders were killed or deported, and their lands were confiscated. These activities of the Afghan government, carried on as a deliberate policy, sometimes exacerbated by other outrages effected by the Pashtun pastoralists, emasculated the Hazaras.
  36. ^ Cite error: The named reference Caldwell2011 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  37. ^ Cite error: The named reference Brit-Pashtun was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  38. ^ Sims-Williams, Nicholas. "Bactrian Documents from Northern Afghanistan. Vol II: Letters and Buddhist". Khalili Collections: 19.
  39. ^ "Afghan and Afghanistan". Abdul Hai Habibi. alamahabibi.com. 1969. Retrieved 24 October 2010.
  40. ^ "History of Afghanistan". Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved 22 November 2010.
  41. ^ Muhammad Qasim Hindu Shah (Firishta). "History of the Mohamedan Power in India". Persian Literature in Translation. Packard Humanities Institute. Archived from the original on 11 February 2009. Retrieved 10 January 2007.
  42. ^ "Afghanistan: Glossary". British Library. Archived from the original on 2 July 2010. Retrieved 15 March 2008.
  43. ^ a b Huang, Guiyou (30 December 2008). The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Asian American Literature [3 volumes]. ABC-CLIO. ISBN 978-1-56720-736-1. In Afghanistan, up until the 1970s, the common reference to Afghan meant Pashtun. . . . The term Afghan as an inclusive term for all ethnic groups was an effort begun by the "modernizing" King Amanullah (1909-1921). . . .
  44. ^ "Constitution of the Kingdom of Afghanistan – Wikisource, the free online library". en.wikisource.org. Retrieved 29 March 2024.
  45. ^ Tyler, John A. (10 October 2021). Afghanistan Graveyard of Empires: Why the Most Powerful Armies of Their Time Found Only Defeat or Shame in This Land of Endless Wars. Aries Consolidated LLC. ISBN 978-1-387-68356-7. The largest ethnic group in Afghanistan is that of Pashtuns, who were historically known as the Afghans. The term Afghan is now intended to indicate people of other ethnic groups as well.
  46. ^ Bodetti, Austin (11 July 2019). "What will happen to Afghanistan's national languages?". The New Arab.
  47. ^ Chiovenda, Andrea (12 November 2019). Crafting Masculine Selves: Culture, War, and Psychodynamics in Afghanistan. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-007355-8. Niamatullah knew Persian very well, as all the educated Pashtuns generally do in Afghanistan
  48. ^ Saddiqa, Ayesha (2018). "The Role of Pashto (as L1) and Urdu (as L2) in English Language Learning". Linguistics and Literature Review. 4 (1): 1–17. doi:10.29145/2018/llr/040101 (inactive 12 July 2025). ISSN 2221-6510.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: DOI inactive as of July 2025 (link)
  49. ^ "Hindu Society and English Rule". The Westminster Review. 108 (213–214). The Leonard Scott Publishing Company: 154. 1877. Hindustani had arisen as a lingua franca from the intercourse of the Persian-speaking Pathans with the Hindi-speaking Hindus.
  50. ^ Krishnamurthy, Rajeshwari (28 June 2013). "Kabul Diary: Discovering the Indian connection". Gateway House: Indian Council on Global Relations. Retrieved 13 March 2018. Most Afghans in Kabul understand and/or speak Hindi, thanks to the popularity of Indian cinema in the country.
  51. ^ Glatzer, Bernt (2002). "The Pashtun Tribal System" (PDF). New Delhi: Concept Publishers. Archived from the original (PDF) on 16 August 2021. Retrieved 25 January 2015.
  52. ^ Romano, Amy (2003). A Historical Atlas of Afghanistan. The Rosen Publishing Group. p. 28. ISBN 0-8239-3863-8. Retrieved 17 October 2010.
  53. ^ Syed Saleem Shahzad (20 October 2006). "Profiles of Pakistan's Seven Tribal Agencies". Retrieved 22 April 2010.
  54. ^ "Ethnic map of Afghanistan" (PDF). Thomas Gouttierre, Center For Afghanistan Studies, University of Nebraska at Omaha; Matthew S. Baker, Stratfor. National Geographic Society. 2003. Archived from the original (PDF) on 27 February 2008. Retrieved 24 October 2010.
  55. ^ "Ethnologue report for Southern Pashto: Iran (1993)". SIL International. Ethnologue: Languages of the World. Retrieved 18 February 2016.
  56. ^ Romano, Amy (2003). A Historical Atlas of Afghanistan. The Rosen Publishing Group. p. 28. ISBN 0-8239-3863-8. Retrieved 17 October 2010.
  57. ^ Syed Saleem Shahzad (20 October 2006). "Profiles of Pakistan's Seven Tribal Agencies". Jamestown. Retrieved 22 April 2010.
  58. ^ "Who Are the Pashtun People of Afghanistan and Pakistan?". ThoughtCo. Retrieved 14 August 2022.
  59. ^ "Hybrid Census to Generate Spatially-disaggregated Population Estimate". United Nations world data form. Archived from the original on 17 May 2020. Retrieved 2 August 2020.
  60. ^ "Pakistan – The World Factbook". Central Intelligence Agency. Retrieved 19 January 2021.
  61. ^ "Afghanistan". The World Factbook (2025 ed.). Central Intelligence Agency. Retrieved 24 September 2022. (Archived 2022 edition.)
  62. ^ "South Asia :: Pakistan – The World Factbook – Central Intelligence Agency". Central Intelligence Agency. Retrieved 24 February 2019.
  63. ^ "What Languages Are Spoken in Pakistan?". World atlas. 30 July 2019.
  64. ^ "Pakistan", The World Factbook, Central Intelligence Agency, 25 June 2025, retrieved 2 July 2025
  65. ^ Canfield, Robert L.; Rasuly-Paleczek, Gabriele (4 October 2010). Ethnicity, Authority and Power in Central Asia: New Games Great and Small. Routledge. p. 148. ISBN 978-1-136-92750-8. By the late-eighteenth century perhaps 100,000 "Afghan" or "Puthan" migrants had established several generations of political control and economic consolidation within numerous Rohilkhand communities
  66. ^ "Pakhtoons in Kashmir". The Hindu. 20 July 1954. Archived from the original on 9 December 2004. Retrieved 28 November 2012. Over a lakh Pakhtoons living in Jammu and Kashmir as nomad tribesmen without any nationality became Indian subjects on July 17. Batches of them received certificates to this effect from the Kashmir Prime Minister, Bakshi Ghulam Mohammed, at village Gutligabh, 17 miles from Srinagar.


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