Hazaragi Alphabet & Letters

Hazaragi (هزارگی) is the variety of Persian spoken by the Hazaras of central Afghanistan. It is above all a spoken language, and when Hazaras write, in poetry, song lyrics, letters or social media posts, they usually use the alphabet of Dari, the Persian of Afghanistan. In the common Dari-based orthography, the letters are ا ب پ ت ث ج چ ح خ د ذ ر ز ژ س ش ص ض ط ظ ع غ ف ق ک گ ل م ن و ه ی, 32 in all, plus آ (alif with madda, a long ā at the start of a word) and hamza ء. Letters join and change shape at the start, middle and end of a word; Unicode stores one code per letter and the font draws the joined forms, so the plain letters on this page are the right ones to copy.

Four letters are what Persian added to the Arabic alphabet for its own sounds: پ p, چ ch, ژ zh and گ g. Seven others, ث ح ذ ص ض ط ظ, are kept mainly in Arabic loanwords and pronounced as ordinary s, h, z and t: ث س ص all sound s, ح sounds h, ذ ز ض ظ all sound z, and ط sounds t. The eighth, ع, is not pronounced like Arabic ʿayn in ordinary Afghan Persian: it is a glottal stop or silent, depending on position and speaker, and may lengthen a preceding vowel. Choosing the right spelling is a matter of knowing the word, not of hearing it.

Short vowels are normally left unwritten. The long ones have letters: ا for ā, ی for ī, ē and y, and و for ū, ō and w; Afghan Persian keeps the old ē and ō that Iranian Persian has merged into ī and ū. When a word could be misread, zabar َ (a), zer ِ (i) and pesh ُ (u) spell out the short vowels, tashdid ّ doubles a consonant, sukun ْ shows that no vowel follows, tanwin ً gives the ending -an of Arabic adverbs such as حتماً (certainly), and a small hamza ٔ on a final ه marks the ezafe link, as in خانهٔ ما (our house).

Hazaragi and Dari: what is different, and what is not

Hazaragi is understood by other Dari speakers and its grammar is Persian, but its accent and vocabulary are its own. It carries many words of Turkic and Mongolic origin, a trace of the Hazaras' history, and its accent differs enough to be noticeable to a listener from Kabul or Tehran. Most Hazaragi writing uses the Dari alphabet, but the Hazaragi Academy developed a modified Perso-Arabic script with extra letters for Hazaragi sounds in 2019; adoption remains limited, and there is no single fixed standard for writing the spoken forms.

Two look-alike pairs cause most of the trouble in Hazaragi and Dari text typed on Arabic keyboards. The Persian ک (keheh, U+06A9) and ی (Farsi yeh, U+06CC, with no dots at the end of a word) look almost like the Arabic ك and ي, but they are different characters, and a word typed with the Arabic ones may not match the same word in a search. The other thing to know is invisible: the zero-width non-joiner (U+200C, ‌) keeps a prefix or suffix close to its word without joining it, as in می‌روم (I go); it has no glyph, so it is not in the grid, but Persian keyboards have a key for it.

How to type Hazaragi letters: keyboard, phone and codes

There is no separate Hazaragi keyboard; Hazaras type with the Persian (Farsi) layout, which has every letter on this page. On Windows, open Settings, Time & language, Language & region, add Persian and switch layouts with Windows + Space; on the Persian (Standard) layout the zero-width non-joiner is Shift + Space. On a Mac, add Persian under System Settings, Keyboard, Input Sources. On Android and iPhone, add the Persian keyboard in the keyboard settings; Gboard and the iOS keyboard both have one.

For a single character, Microsoft Word accepts the hex code followed by Alt + X: 067E for پ, 0686 for چ, 0698 for ژ, 06AF for گ, 06A9 for ک and 06CC for ی. In HTML the same codes work as گ and so on. The afghani sign ؋ is U+060B (؋), although amounts are also written with افغانی or AFN.

Hazaragi punctuation is the Persian set: the comma ،, semicolon ؛ and question mark ؟ are turned to face right-to-left text, quotations go in guillemets « », the full stop is an ordinary dot, and the percent sign is ٪. Numbers are written either with 0–9 or with the Persian digits ۰ ۱ ۲ ۳ ۴ ۵ ۶ ۷ ۸ ۹, whose 4, 5 and 6 look different from the Arabic ٤ ٥ ٦; digits run left to right even inside a right-to-left sentence.

Where the Hazaragi language is spoken

Hazaragi is the language of Hazarajat, the mountainous centre of Afghanistan around Bamyan and Daykundi and in parts of Ghazni, Uruzgan and Wardak, and of Hazara neighbourhoods in Kabul and Mazar-i-Sharif. Outside Afghanistan there are large, long-settled communities in Quetta in Pakistan (Hazara Town and Mariabad) and in Mashhad and other Iranian cities, and a diaspora in Australia, Europe and North America; Australia's public broadcaster SBS runs a Hazaragi-language service.

CLDR estimates about 2.4 million Hazaragi speakers in Afghanistan. Other estimates are higher and uncertain, since Afghanistan has had no full census in decades and Hazaragi is often counted as a variety of Dari; Afghanistan's constitution names Dari and Pashto as official state languages but does not name Hazaragi separately. For the standard written language see the Persian collection, for the country's other major language the Pashto collection, and for the flag 🇦🇫, the afghani ؋ and the emoji people use for the country, the Afghanistan collection.

Is there a Hazara flag emoji?

Country and territory flag emoji use pairs of regional indicator letters for valid region codes (🇦 + 🇫 makes 🇦🇫); Unicode also includes other flag emoji, such as the rainbow, transgender and pirate flags, while England, Scotland and Wales are the only subdivision-flag sequences with broad support. The Hazara flag has no standard Unicode emoji sequence, so people share it as an image or sticker rather than as a standard emoji. The flags for Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran, 🇦🇫 🇵🇰 🇮🇷, are in the grid above.