Pashto is natively spoken by about 50 million people, primarily in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where it is an official language. It is integral to Pashtun cultural identity, known for its oral poetry, Pashtunwali code of conduct, and traditional dance. Written in the Perso-Arabic script, Pashto grammar features a subject-object-verb (SOV) word order, extensive use of affixes to indicate grammatical relationships, and a system of verb conjugations that denote tense, aspect, and mood.