News and Views

Portland State University Announces Pashto Classes

The Heritage Language Initiative (HLI) Program at Portland State University (PSU) will begin offering a Heritage Pashto course for the fall term of 2007.  PSU is one of only a handful of universities nationwide to offer Pashto.  Pashto is the language of the Pashtuns and is widely spoken in Afghanistan and the western region of Pakistan. Pashto has its origins in the Indo-European family of languages and has been adapted to create several dialects.  A fascinating feature of Pashto is that it is written in the Arabic script, but the alphabet contains a number of original characters not to be found in other languages that use Arabic script such as Arabic itself and Farsi.  The Heritage Pashto class will be taught by Amin Wahab and focus on script (alphabet), reading, writing, grammar, and vocabulary development.

For more information, please contact Dr. Linda Godson, Heritage Language Initiative Coordinator at 360-546-0341 or [email protected]