Afghani

Afghani is the name used in Persian historical writings for the Eastern Iranian language otherwise known as Pashto, the mother tongue of the Pashtun tribes of southern and eastern Afghanistan and the Peshawar valley. Its verse grew from an oral tradition of tappa lyrics, with the earliest named poet, Amir Kror Suri, placed in the 700s.

In the 1500s Bayazid Pir Roshan of Waziristan devised a 41-letter Perso-Arabic alphabet for his Roshani movement and composed Khair-ul-Bayan, one of the language's earliest prose works. The scholar Akhund Darweza answered his teachings with Makhzanul Islam.

The 1600s brought a literary golden age under the warrior-poet Khushal Khan Khattak, called the father of Pashto literature, and the Sufi poet Rahman Baba, who died in 1706. Persian long remained the language of courts and government, leaving Afghani as the speech of tribe and camp.