Persian (Farsi and Dari) Alphabet & Letters

Iranian Persian (Farsi) and Afghan Persian (Dari) use the Persian alphabet, an adaptation of the Arabic script. In order 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 such as آب, water) and hamza ء. Text runs right to left, and most letters join their neighbours 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 ones to copy.

Four letters are Persian additions to the Arabic alphabet, for sounds Arabic does not have: پ p, چ ch, ژ zh and گ g. Eight others, ث ح ذ ص ض ط ظ ع, are kept for words and names borrowed from Arabic and are pronounced like ordinary Persian sounds, so ث س ص all sound s, ذ ز ض ظ all sound z, ت ط both sound t and ح ه both sound h. Which one a word takes is a matter of knowing its spelling, not of hearing it.

Short vowels are normally not written. The long ones have letters: ا for ā, ی for ī, ē and y, and و for ū, ō and v or w. Where 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 ً writes the -an ending 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).

What Parsi-Dari is: Parsi, Dari and Farsi

All three names are old names of Persian. Pārsi is the language's own older name; Fārsi is its Arabic-influenced form, because Arabic has no p. Dari is the name of the Persian literary language since early Islamic times, usually explained as the language of the court (dar, darbār), and it is the official name of Persian in Afghanistan, where it is one of the two official languages with Pashto. ISO 639-3 and CLDR use prd for Parsi-Dari, but Glottolog treats that entry as a duplicate of Zoroastrian Dari (gbz), a language of Iranian Zoroastrian communities distinct from Afghan Dari Persian.

Two similar names belong to other things. The Parsis of India, descendants of Zoroastrians who left Iran centuries ago, speak Gujarati, not Persian, so some searches for the Parsi language are really about them. Zoroastrian Dari, also called Behdini, is a separate Iranian language of the Zoroastrian communities of Yazd and Kerman. Neither is the language of this page.

Farsi vs Dari written: the same letters, different words

Written Persian looks the same in Kabul and in Tehran: the alphabet, the punctuation and the digits are identical, and a reader of one can read the other. The differences are in sound and vocabulary. Afghan Persian keeps the old vowels ē and ō that Iranian Persian has merged into ī and ū, so شیر is shēr (lion) and shīr (milk) in Afghanistan but shir for both in Iran; the spelling does not change. Everyday words differ too: thank you is تشکر (tashakor) in Afghanistan and ممنون or مرسی (mersi) in Iran.

Both countries count years in the Solar Hijri calendar, which begins at Nowruz in March, but they name the months differently. Iran uses the old Persian names فروردین اردیبهشت خرداد (Farvardin, Ordibehesht, Khordad) and so on; Afghanistan uses the names of the zodiac signs, حمل ثور جوزا (Hamal, Sawr, Jawza) and so on.

Two look-alike pairs cause most of the trouble when Persian is 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 will not match the same word in a search. The other thing to know is invisible: the zero-width non-joiner (U+200C, ‌), the half-space, 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.

How to type Dari and Persian letters: keyboard, phone and codes

Any Persian (Farsi) keyboard layout 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 half-space 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 and the rial sign ﷼ is U+FDFC, although most people write افغانی or ریال, or AFN and IRR, after the amount; in Iran prices are often given in tomans, ten rials each.

Punctuation follows 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 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 Parsi-Dari (Zoroastrian Dari) is spoken

Glottolog treats Parsi-Dari (prd) as a duplicate of Zoroastrian Dari (gbz), a language of Iranian Zoroastrian communities rather than a variety of Persian spoken in Afghanistan and Iran. Farsi in Iran, Dari in Afghanistan and Tajik in Tajikistan are together spoken by tens of millions.

For standard Persian see the Persian collection, for the Persian of the Hazara people the Hazaragi collection, for Afghanistan's other official language the Pashto collection, and for Tajik, the language of Tajikistan, written in Cyrillic, the Tajik collection. The flags 🇦🇫 🇮🇷, the currencies and the emoji people use for each country are in the Afghanistan and Iran collections.