Pashto is a South Asian Indo-Iranian language that typically follows a Subject–Object–Verb (SOV) order in clause structure.

Pashto shows ergative alignment particularly in the past (perfective) transitive constructions, where the agent is marked differently from present tense.

Khushal Khan Khattak was a 17th-century Pashtun tribal chief and warrior-poet renowned for martial and patriotic poetry.

Rahman Baba was a 17th-century Sufi poet whose lyrical Pashto poetry became foundational in classical Pashto literature.

Pashto is written in an extended Perso-Arabic script that includes additional letters to represent Pashto phonemes.

A tappa (landai) is a short traditional Pashto folk couplet made up of two lines with a characteristic metrical pattern.

The southern or Kandahari dialect group is characteristic of the Kandahar region and differs phonologically from northern varieties like Yusufzai.

Pashto uses an oblique case form to mark objects and certain complements, notably in past transitive constructions where ergative patterns occur.

Ghani Khan was a 20th-century modernist Pashto poet and thinker noted for innovative themes and philosophical reflection in his verse.

Many classical Pashto poets adopted the arūz system of quantitative meter from Arabic and Persian poetic tradition for formal compositions.