Afghan proverbs

Collections of Pashto, Dari, and Balochi proverbs in Arabic script are downloadable at the links at bottom of this article.

The earlier is J. Christy Wilson's collection of 100 (2002), One Hundred Afghan Persian Proverbs, the list having been reproduced (without credit) in other sources.

There is also a collection of Dari proverbs with German translations by Noor Nazrabi, Afghanische Redensarten und Volksweisheiten.

An older source containing 406 Pashto proverbs is Thorburn's Bannú: Or Our Afghan Frontier (1876), where he includes them in his book on pp. 231–473.

There are reports that Nuri published a selection of proverbs from Paśto Toləna in 1910 (Kreyenbroek 2010:151).

[11] There are two additional volumes printed in Pakistan, both by M. A. Lashkar, Oulasi mataluna (Popular proverbs) in 2005[12] and Da mataluno qisay: Ter pa her baqi rozgar (Stories of proverbs: Old forgotten new adopted) in 2009.

A local committee working with Yun produced a collection of 171 proverbs (2010), each one translated into English, Korean, and Pashto.

[20] More recently, Khuda Baksh Buzdar compiled a larger collection of Balochi proverbs.

[22] Buddruss, writing in German, described Wakhi proverbs from Hunza District in Pakistan.

For example, there is a traditional proverb in Pashto (Bartlotti and Khattak 2006: 264) and Dari (Wilson 2002:32), "The wound of the sword will heal, but not that of the tongue."

Proverbs that trace their origin to stories are found in Pashto (Thorburn 1876: 314), Dari (Zellem 2012b:153), and Balochi (Badalkhan 2000).

[27] The second dissertation 'argues that Pashtun proverbs encode and promote a patriarchal view and sexist ideology.

[33] The use of proverbs and other artistic language in talking about war and instability in Afghanistan is the subject of a study by Margaret Mills.