Afghanistan Analysts Network – English

Posts tagged: Dari

Dari

Hamstrung by Translation: How to analyse Afghanistan in an Afghan language?

Borhan Osman •

The most efficient languages to write about Afghan politics and society ought to be the two main languages of the country, Dari and Pashto. No foreign language can capture the various concepts native to Afghanistan as intricately as native speakers’ own languages do, for example in the case of Pashtunwali customs. However, the local languages […]

Context and Culture Read more

One Thousand Dollars for Books per Year: Afghanistan’s undersupplied universities

Christine Roehrs •

Afghan university students still do not have proper textbooks. Their professors give them so-called ‘chapters’ – copies of excerpts from lecture notes or books that are often out-dated. Libraries on the other hand remain underfunded dumping grounds for donated books that mostly do not fit needs, curricula or lecture contents. Why is that still so, […]

Economy, Development, Environment Read more

Guest Blog: Inequality in Equality: Linguistic Convergence between Dari and Pashto

Lutz Rzehak •

Language matters. The issue of how to ‘correctly’ name institutions is just one linguistic issue which has become highly politicised in post-Taleban Afghanistan. AAN guest blogger Lutz Rzehak(*) looks at these issues from the point of view of a linguist who speaks three of Afghanistan’s languages and has carried out research there for several decades. […]

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Khalil Lula and His Friends or: Bad Dari spoken

Thomas Ruttig •

It has been a while that I have been collecting examples of how Afghan names and toponyms are often not only misspelled but almost violated in the media. For me, this reflects an utter superficiality because many journalists do not seem to care much about whom or what they speak about (and have no clue […]

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Talking Dari (1): The Road to Turkestan

Thomas Ruttig •

Today, we continue our little series with important Afghan-language expressions that are useful to describe political situations in striking accuracy. This time we turn to one of the most famous Iranian poets – so actually we also could say ‘Talking Farsi’ here. But let’s not be too nitty-gritty. ترسم نرسی به کعبه ای اعرابی کین ره […]

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