The Pushto alphabet, which has more vowel sounds than either Persian or Arabic, represents the vowels more extensively than either the Persian or the Arabic alphabets. With the adoption of Pushto as a national language of Afghanistan, some revisions of the spelling system have been made in the interest of clarity. Unlike other Iranian languages, such as Persian, Pushto allows consonant clusters of two or three sounds at the beginning of a syllable. Pushto distinguishes two grammatical genders as well as singular and plural. There are generally two nominal cases in Pushto, although the vocative case is still used with singular nouns.
Case is marked both with suffixes and with changes in the vowel of the noun stem and stress.
In Afghanistan, Pushto is second in prestige to Dari, the Persian dialect spoken natively in the north and west. Because of the political power of the Pushtuns, however, Pushto has been a required subject in Dari medium schools, and as an official language has been one of the languages of the government. For practical purposes, however, Dari is the language of business and higher education, and so Pushtuns learn Dari. Pushto has an extensive written tradition. There are a number of classic Pushtun poets, most notably Khosal Khan Khattak.