The Arabic alphabet does not show stress placement, but in transliteration it is indicated by the use of acute accent diactric: ´ over the vowel.

The Southeastern (SE) and Southwestern (SW), Northeastern (NE) and Northwestern (NW) dialects of Pashto are included.

Since the time of Bayazid Pir Roshan, ڊ (dāl with subscript dot) was used for /d͡z/, which was still used in the Diwan of Mirza written in 1690 CE,[11] but this sign was later replaced by ځ.

Both of them use additional letters: ټ ډ ړ ږ ښ ڼ ې ۍ‎.

[11] The Afghan standard is currently dominant due to the lack and negative treatment of Pashto education in Pakistan.

Both are widely used, but the Afghan official materials prefer the گ‎ form, while the Pakistani orthography sets a specific glyph for ګ‎ which looks like ك‎ with a circle below.

On the other hand, words with خښ‎ combination, like نٙخْښَه‎‎ nәxṣ̌a "mark, sign", بٙخْښٙل‎ bәxṣ̌әl "forgive, pardon", are written identically according to both standards, but some authors speaking Northern Pashto may write them according to their pronunciation: نٙښَه‎‎ nәxa, بٙښٙل‎ bәxәl.

The auxiliary verb شول‎ in passive constructions is often written without a space with the copula in the Afghan orthography.

The borrowed words should be written the way they were in the original languages: بُلْبُل‎ bulbul "nightingale", گُل‎‎ or ګُل‎ gul "flower".

In the 16th century, Bayazid Pir Roshan from Waziristan Pakhtunkhwa invented the Roshani script to write Pashto.

Most of the new letters he introduced i.e. ګ ,ښ ,ړ ,ډ ,څ ,ټ and ڼ are still written in the same form and are pronounced almost in the same way in modern Pashto.

The sound system of the southern dialect of modern Pashto preserves the distinction between all the consonant phonemes of his orthography.

His letter ڊ (dāl with dot below) to represent /d͡z/ has been replaced by ځ in modern Pashto.

The following table (read from left to right) gives the letters' isolated forms, along with possible Latin equivalents and typical IPA values: Waziristani has the following vowels: These can potentially be romanised as:[14] In the Marwat dialect and in the Karlāṇi dialects presence of nasalised vowels has been noted.