Mazandarani Alphabet

Mazandarani, also spelled Mazanderani and called Tabari after Tabaristan, the old name of the region, is a Northwestern Iranian language of the Caspian group. Its speakers call it مازرونی (Mazeruni) or طبری (Tabari); in Persian it is مازندرانی (Mazandarani). Its closest relative is Gilaki, spoken just to the west in Gilan. It is related to Persian but is not a dialect of it: a Persian speaker hearing Mazandarani for the first time follows only part of it.

Mazandarani has no official standard and is not the main language of schooling. Persian is the language of education, print and government, and Mazandarani speakers read and write Persian. When they write Mazandarani, in poetry, song lyrics, local magazines, messages and the Mazandarani Wikipedia, they use the Persian alphabet, so every letter on this page is on a Persian keyboard. پ p, چ ch, ژ zh and گ g are the four letters Persian added to the Arabic alphabet, and ک and ی are the Persian forms of kaf and ye. Several letters share one sound because they keep the spelling of Arabic words: ث س ص are all s, ذ ز ض ظ are all z, ت ط are t, and ح ه are h.

Mazandarani has an old written past. The Marzbān-nāma, a book of fables and advice, is traditionally said to have been written in Tabari by Marzban ibn Rustam, a prince of the Bavandid dynasty of Tabaristan, but this attribution is disputed; the surviving Persian version was written by Sa'd al-Din Varavini in the early 13th century. The semi-legendary poet Amir Pazevari (امیر پازواری) is the best-known voice of Mazandarani verse; his couplets are still sung today.

Writing Mazandarani vowels and spelling

The Persian script writes long vowels with letters, ا for ā, و for u and ی for i, and leaves short vowels out. Persian readers fill them in because they know the words; Mazandarani words are far less familiar on paper, so writers often add the optional vowel signs: zebar َ for a, pish ُ for o, zir ِ for e, and sokun ْ over a consonant with no vowel after it. Tashdid ّ doubles a consonant.

Spelling is not fixed and varies from writer to writer, especially for vowels that Persian does not have. The tanvin signs ً ٌ ٍ appear in Arabic words such as حتماً (hatman, certainly), and the hamza forms أ ؤ ئ ء and ة come in words borrowed through Persian. As in Persian, the invisible zero-width non-joiner (U+200C) keeps the parts of a word apart without a space, as in مرزبان‌نامه.

Punctuation, Persian digits and the rial sign

Mazandarani writing follows Iranian Persian conventions: the comma ، and semicolon ؛ turned upside down, the mirrored question mark ؟ and guillemets « » for quotations. The full stop and exclamation mark are the ordinary . and !.

Numbers are written with Persian digits ۰ ۱ ۲ ۳ ۴ ۵ ۶ ۷ ۸ ۹, which run left to right inside right-to-left text; ۴ ۵ ۶ look different from the Arabic-Indic ٤ ٥ ٦ used in Arabic, so copy the Persian set. The percent sign is ٪, the decimal separator ٫ and the thousands separator ٬. Money is the Iranian rial, written ﷼ or ریال, although prices are usually said in toman (تومان), ten rials.

How to type the Mazandarani alphabet

There is no separate Mazandarani keyboard: use the Persian one, built into Windows, macOS, Android and iOS, which has every letter and mark on this page. On Windows add Persian under Settings, Time & language; on a Mac add it under Keyboard, Input Sources; on a phone add the Persian keyboard in Gboard or the iPhone's keyboard settings, where the vowel signs are on a long-press or the shifted page. Avoid an Arabic keyboard: it types the Arabic kaf ك and ye ي instead of the Persian ک and ی, which look alike in the middle of a word but are different characters, so searches miss the words.

In Microsoft Word you can also type a code and press Alt+X: 067E gives پ, 0686 چ, 0698 ژ, 06AF گ, 06A9 ک, 06CC ی, 064E zebar, 0650 zir, 064F pish and FDFC ﷼. On web pages mark the text with lang="mzn" dir="rtl" so it runs right to left.

Where Mazandarani is spoken

Mazandarani is spoken in northern Iran 🇮🇷, in Mazandaran province between the southern shore of the Caspian Sea and the Alborz mountains: in Sari, the provincial capital, in Amol, Babol, Qaemshahr, Behshahr, Nowshahr and Chalus and the villages around them, and in neighbouring parts of Golestan, Tehran and Semnan provinces. CLDR estimates about 4.4 million speakers; other estimates differ, and in the cities many children now grow up speaking Persian first.

Mazandaran is a green, humid land of rice fields 🌾 and citrus orchards 🍊 on the coastal plain, Hyrcanian forest 🌲 on the mountain slopes and fishing on the Caspian 🌊🐟; together with Gilan it grows most of Iran's rice, eaten every day, often as kateh 🍚. Mount Damavand 🏔️, Iran's highest peak, rises on the province's southern edge. The province is famous for its wrestlers 🤼, and its music, from the sung Amiri couplets to the shepherd's flute laleva 🪈, is loved across Iran. Related languages with their own collections are Gilaki and Persian, and the Iran collection has the country's flag, food and emoji.