What Do They Speak in Afghanistan‪?‬ Lexicon Valley from Booksmart Studios

Dari and Pashto are the two major, official languages of Afghanistan, and are even siblings in the Iranian subfamily of Indo-European languages. One, says John McWhorter, is “disarmingly approachable” while the other is “deliciously intimidating.”
*FULL TRANSCRIPT*
WHAT DO PEOPLE SPEAK IN AFGHANISTAN?
From Booksmart Studios, this is Lexicon Valley, a podcast about language. I'm John McWhorter and here is our question for this episode. What do they speak in Afghanistan? Notice my melody. I put Afghanistan on the low pitch. I didn't say, what do they speak in Afghanistan? I don't mean that precisely. I mean, what do they speak in Afghanistan? The low pitch means that it's a concept that we already know. And by that I mean that we know why I'm talking about Afghanistan and that the reasons are extremely unfortunate. But because this is a language podcast, it occurs to me that we might want to cover, among all the sorts of things that we're thinking about Afghanistan, what is it that the locals there speak? What do they speak in Afghanistan?
You might reasonably suppose that it's Arabic. If I were a layman, I think that's the first thing that I would think. As a matter of fact, I remember when the Taliban first started making the news a good long time ago, I kind of wondered what language is all of that taking place in? And it isn't anything that kept me awake at night, but I didn't know as much of the time and I thought Arabic, I guess. But if you're looking at scenes in Afghanistan, no, they're not speaking Arabic, but then they're not speaking Afghan or Afghani either. Properly, there is no such language. You might think there was because, say, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan. In Turkmenistan, they speak Turkmen, among other things. In Kazakhstan, they speak the language Kazakh. But it's not always like that. So, for example, in Pakistan — our sister podcast Banished, which is hosted by Amna Khalid happens to come to mind — Aman Khalid is Pakistani. Originally, she speaks not some language called Paki, which doesn't exist to my knowledge. She speaks Urdu. She doesn't speak Paki. Same thing with Afghanistan. There is no Afghani language. Noticed that you've never heard of it. Have you ever heard anybody say, well, my original language was Afghan? There's a reason, there is no language like that. And that's because there are two main languages in Afghanistan. And, you know, we can go through our whole lives and never hear them if we don't happen to be people who live in Afghanistan or somewhere close to it. The two languages are Dari and Pashto, Dari and Pashto. Most people in Afghanistan, whatever they spoke on their mama's knee, speak Dari. About half of the population of Afghanistan speak Pashto. A great many people, of course, speak both. And there are other languages. But the big two, the official ones and the ones that almost anybody knows one of and quite possibly both are Dari and Pashto. And what in the world are those? I would say that I've met one Dari speaker in my life and I'm pretty sure I have never met anybody who spoke Pashto, not in any real way. And yet millions and millions and millions of people speak these two languages. What are they? As it happens, they come from the same linguistic family, technically subfamily. And as it happens, the two languages teach us a lesson because they're on opposite poles of the family in terms of an interesting contrast in the ways that languages can be languages. So let's take a look at Dari and Pashto, because that's what the people who we’re seeing in the news are speaking. They're not speaking Arabic.
MILLIONS OF AFGHANS SPEAK DARI
Dari is Persian. I think we all know where Persian is spoken, in terms of its central location, but there are two other places that have truly massive numbers of speakers of Persian. It's just that it isn't called that there. So if you're speaking Persian in Afghanistan, it's called Dari. If you're speaking Persian in Tajikistan, then