Pashto is spoken by over 30 million people.
"As David MacKenzie notes there is no real need to develop a "Standard" Pashto:"The morphological differences between the most extreme north-eastern and south-western dialects are comparatively few and unimportant
 In 1936  a royal decree of Zahir Shah formally granted Pashto the status of an official language, with full rights to use in all aspects of government and education  despite the fact that the ethnically Pashtun royal family and bureaucrats mostly spoke Persian

