Cultural of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa

Khyber Pakhtunkhwa formerly known as the North-West Frontier Province NWFP is one of the four administrative provinces of Pakistan, located in the northwestern region of the country along the international border with Afghanistan.

It was previously known as the North-West Frontier Province until 2010 when the name was changed to Khyber Pakhtunkhwa by the 18th Amendment to Pakistan's Constitution and is known colloquially by various other names. Khyber Pakhtunkhwa is the third-largest province of Pakistan by the size of both population and economy, though it is geographically the smallest of four. Within Pakistan, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa shares a border with Punjab, Balochistan, Azad Kashmir, Gilgit-Baltistan and Islamabad. It is home to 17.9% of Pakistan's total population, with the majority of the province's inhabitants being Pashtuns and Hindko speakers.

The province is the site of the ancient kingdom Gandhara, including the ruins of its capital Pushkalavati near modern-day Charsadda. Originally a stronghold of Buddhism, the history of the region was characterized by frequent invasions under various Empires due to its geographical proximity to the Khyber Pass.

Khyber Pakhtunkhwa means the "Khyber side of the land of the Pashtuns (ethnic Afghans)",where the word Pakhtunkhwa means "Land of the Pashtuns", while according to some scholars, it refers to "Pashtun culture and society". The province is so named due to its ethnic Pashtun majority.

When the British established it as a province, they called it "North West Frontier Province" (abbreviated as NWFP) due to its relative location being in north west of their Indian Empire. After the creation of Pakistan, Pakistan continued with this name but a Pashtun nationalist party, Awami National Party demanded that the province name be changed to "Pakhtunkhwa". Their logic behind that demand was that Punjabi people, Sindhi people and Balochi people have their provinces named after their ethnicities but that is not the case for Pashtun people.

Pakistan Muslim League was against that name since it was too similar to Bacha Khan's demand of a separate nation of Pashtunistan. PML-N wanted to name the province something other than which does not carry Pashtun identity in it as they argued that there were other minor ethnicities living in the province especially Hindkowans who spoke Hindko, thus the word Khyber was introduced with the name because it is the name of a major pass which connects Pakistan to Afghanistan.