Pashtun diaspora refers to ethnic Pashtuns who live outside of their traditional homeland, which is south of the Hindu Kush mountains in Afghanistan and west of the Indus River in Pakistan.Pakistan is home to the largest Pashtun community. Smaller populations of Pashtuns are found in the European Union, North America, Australia and other parts of the world. They may also be found in the Middle East, particularly in the United Arab Emirates, Iran, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar and Bahrain. In Northern India, there are communities of Indians who trace their origins to the traditional Pashtun homeland.
The Pashtun ethnic group also known as Pathan are believed to have settled in the vast Pashtunistantribal region in the first millennium C.E., between the Hindu Kush mountains and the Indus River. According to Ethnologue, they currently number around 50 million but some sources give slightly lower or higher figures. In the Indian subcontinent, the group is usually referred to as Pathan.
Pashtun may refer to:
Pashto (English pronunciation: /ˈpʌʃtoʊ/,rarely /ˈpæʃtoʊ/; Pashto: پښتو Pax̌tō [ˈpəʂt̪oː]), also known in older literature as Afghānī (افغاني) or Paṭhānī, is the South-Central Asian language of the Pashtuns. It's speakers are called Pashtuns, Pathans or sometimes Afghans whether they are from Pakistan or Afghanistan. It is an Eastern Iranian language, belonging to the Indo-European family. Pashto is one of the two official languages of Afghanistan, and it is the second-largest regional language of Pakistan, mainly spoken in the west and northwest of the country. Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) are almost 100% Pashto-speaking, while it's the majority language of province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Pashto is the main language among the Pashtun diaspora around the world. The total number of Pashto-speakers is estimated to be 45–60 million people worldwide.
Pashto belongs to the Northeastern Iranian group of the Indo-Iranian branch, but Ethnologue lists it as Southeastern Iranian. Pashto has two main dialect groups, “soft” and “hard”, the latter known as Pakhtu. Pashto spoken in FATA has many distinctive dialects.
The Pashtuns /ˈpʌʃˌtʊnz/ or /ˈpæʃˌtuːnz/ (Pashto: پښتانه Pax̌tānə; singular masculine: پښتون Pax̌tūn, feminine: پښتنه Pax̌tana; also Pakhtuns), historically known by the exonyms Afghans (Persian: افغان, Afğān) and Pathans (Hindi-Urdu: पठान, پٹھان, Paṭhān), are an ethnic group with populations in Afghanistan and Pakistan. They are generally classified as Eastern Iranian who use Pashto language and follow Pashtunwali, which is a traditional set of ethics guiding individual and communal conduct. The origin of Pashtuns is unclear but historians have come across references to various ancient peoples called Pakthas (Pactyans) between the 2nd and the 1st millennium BC, who may be their early ancestors. Often characterised as a warrior and martial race, their history is mostly spread amongst various countries of South and Central Asia, centred on their traditional seat of power in medieval Afghanistan.
During the Delhi Sultanate era, the Pashtun Lodi dynasty replaced the Turkic rulers in North India. Some ruled from the Bengal Sultanate. Other Pashtuns fought the Safavids and Mughals before obtaining an independent state in the early-18th century, which began with a successful revolution by Mirwais Hotak followed by conquests of Ahmad Shah Durrani. The Barakzai dynasty played a vital role during the Great Game from the 19th century to the 20th century as they were caught between the imperialist designs of the British and Russian empires. Pashtuns are the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan and ruled as the dominant ethno-linguistic group for over 300 years.
An ancestor or forebear is a parent or (recursively) the parent of an ancestor (i.e., a grandparent, great-grandparent, great-great-grandparent, and so forth). Ancestor is "any person from whom one is descended. In law the person from whom an estate has been inherited."
Two individuals have a genetic relationship if one is the ancestor of the other, or if they share a common ancestor from the past. In evolutionary theory, species which share an evolutionary ancestor are said to be of common descent. However, this concept of ancestry does not apply to some bacteria and other organisms capable of horizontal gene transfer.
Assuming that all of an individual's ancestors are otherwise unrelated to each other, that individual has 2n ancestors in the nth generation before him and a total of about 2g+1 ancestors in the g generations before him. In practice, however, it is clear that the vast majority of ancestors of humans (and indeed any other species) are multiply related (see pedigree collapse). Consider n = 40: the human species is more than 40 generations old, yet the number 240, approximately 1012 or one trillion, dwarfs the number of humans who have ever lived.
The United States has a racially and ethnically diverse population.The census officially recognizes six ethnic and racial categories: White American, Black or African American, Native American and Alaska Native, Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander, and people of two or more races; a race called "Some other race" is also used in the census and other surveys, but is not official. The United States Census Bureau also classifies Americans as "Hispanic or Latino" and "Not Hispanic or Latino", which identifies Hispanic and Latino Americans as a racially diverse ethnicity that composes the largest minority group in the nation.
White Americans are the racial majority. African Americans are the largest racial minority, amounting to 13.2% of the population. Hispanic and Latino Americans amount to 17.1% of the population, making up the largest ethnic minority. The White, non-Hispanic or Latino population make up 62.6% of the nation's total, with the total White population (including White Hispanics and Latinos) being 77.1%.
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