{"book":"adl0957","page":155,"text":"116\n\nPART THREE\n\nLanguage and Literature*\n\nPashto is the chief language of the Afghans and extends throughout the country. It is also spoken in Pashtunistan. Two main dialects are recognized—Yusufzai or Eastern and Kandahari.\n\nNext to Pashto, Persian is the most important language of the country. It is spoken mostly in the cities and towns. Afghan Persian, or perhaps one should call it by its historical and literary name \"Dari\", still preserves the old distinction of madjhul and maruf between u and o and i and e, which does not exist in Iranian Persian of today.\n\nThe Afghans in all ages have played an important rôle in the cultural development of the civilized nations. The Rigveda of the early Aryans and the Avesta of Zoroaster are two of the most important classics of this country that have given the world religions and philosophies, which in range, depth, variety and power still command universal admiration.\n\nWe give here a short list of some of the Afghan writers and philosophers of the early Islamic period, who in creative power, quality of workmanship, intellectual force as well as in the delineation of soft emotions, in dramatic touch, in elegance, purity, vividness and grace, in sublimity of thought and style are to be compared with the best writers of the world. But for the works of these men, Persian literature could not have attained the high standard of excellence which it enjoys today. The first attempt to compose verses in Persian was made under\n\n*Compiled by Dr. Ahmad Jawid, Professor of Persian Literature, Faculty of Letters, Kabul University.","chars":1584,"image":"https://storage.googleapis.com/adl-page-images/adl0957/00155.jpg","first_page":1,"last_page":377,"title":"new guide to Afghanistan","permalink":"https://afghanpress.org/book/adl0957/155","canvas":"https://afghanpress.org/iiif/adl0957/canvas/155","source":"https://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/books/adl0957/","source_pdf":"https://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/pdf/adl0957_download.pdf","rights":{"image":{"statement":"Public domain. NYU states: \"All works presented on this website are, unless otherwise indicated, in the public domain. The images available on this website may be freely reproduced, distributed and transmitted by anyone for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial.\"","uri":"http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/NoC-US/1.0/","holder":"New York University Libraries","source":"https://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/about.html","delivery":"Images are served from a copy mirrored by this project, not from NYU's servers, under the reproduction terms above.","endorsement":"This is an independent project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or reviewed by New York University."},"text":{"statement":"Machine-generated transcription, dedicated to the public domain under CC0 1.0. No warranty of accuracy: see the provenance block on every page.","uri":"https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/","holder":"Steps Ventures"}},"provenance":{"text_produced_by":"gemini-3.1-pro-preview","thinking_level":"low","read_completed":"2026-08-09","per_page_confidence":null,"per_page_confidence_note":"Not recorded during the corpus run. No calibrated per-page score exists, and none is estimated here.","human_reviewed":false,"accuracy_context":"Roughly two thirds of characters agree with a modern printed edition of the same text. Much of the disagreement is editorial, not misreading. Treat the transcription as a finding aid and read the page image before quoting.","primary_source":"The page image. The text is an index into it."}}