The Persian alphabet (), also known as the Perso-Arabic script, is the right-to-left alphabet used for the Persian language. An Arabic-based alphabet, it is largely identical to the Arabic alphabet with four additional letters: , , , and (the sounds 'p', 'ch', 'zh', and 'g', respectively), in addition to the obsolete that was used for the sound . This letter is no longer used in Persian, as the -sound changed to , e.g. archaic > 'language'. Although the sound () is written as "" nowadays in New Persian), it is different to the Arabic () sound, which uses the same letter.
It was the basis of many Arabic-based scripts used in Central and South Asia. It is used for both Iranian and Dari, which are standard varieties of Persian, and is one of two official writing systems for the Persian language, alongside the Cyrillic-based Tajik alphabet.
The script is mostly but not exclusively right-to-left; mathematical expressions, numeric dates and numbers bearing units are embedded from left to right. The script is cursive, meaning most letters in a word connect to each other; when they are typed, contemporary word processors automatically join adjacent letter forms. Persian is unusual among Arabic scripts because a zero-width non-joiner is sometimes entered in a word, causing a letter to become disconnected from others in the same word.
History The Persian alphabet is directly derived and developed from the Arabic alphabet. The Arabic alphabet was introduced to the Persian-speaking world after the Muslim conquest of Persia and the fall of the Sasanian Empire in the 7th century. Following this, the Arabic language became the principal language of government and religious institutions in Persia, which led to the widespread usage of the Arabic script. Classical Persian literature and poetry were affected by this simultaneous usage of Arabic and Persian. A new influx of Arabic vocabulary soon entered the Persian language. In the 8th century, the Tahirid dynasty and Samanid dynasty officially adopted the Arabic script for writing Persian, followed by the Saffarid dynasty in the 9th century, gradually displacing the various Pahlavi scripts used for the Persian language earlier. By the 9th-century, the Perso-Arabic alphabet became the dominant form of writing in Greater Khorasan.
Under the influence of various Persian Empires, many languages in Central and South Asia that adopted the Arabic script use the Persian Alphabet as the basis of their writing systems. Today, extended versions of the Persian alphabet are used to write a wide variety of Indo-Iranian languages, including Kurdish, Balochi, Pashto, Urdu (from Classical Hindustani), Saraiki, Panjabi, Sindhi and Kashmiri. In the past the use of the Persian alphabet was common among Turkic languages, but today is relegated to those spoken within Iran, such as Azerbaijani, Turkmen, Qashqai, Chaharmahali and Khalaj. The Uyghur language in western China is the most notable exception to this.
During the Soviet period many languages in Central Asia, including Persian, were reformed by the government. This ultimately resulted in the Cyrillic-based alphabet used in Tajikistan today. See: .
Letters
Below are the 32 letters of the modern Persian alphabet. Since the script is cursive, the appearance of a letter changes depending on its position: isolated, initial (joined on the left), medial (joined on both sides) and final (joined on the right) of a word. These include 28 letters of the Arabic alphabet, in addition to 4 other letters.
The names of the letters are mostly the ones used in Arabic except for the Persian pronunciation. The only ambiguous name is , which is used for both and . For clarification, they are often called (literally "-like " after , the name for the letter that uses the same base form) and (literally "two-eyed ", after the contextual middle letterform ), respectively. There are nine Persian letters that are mainly used in Arabic or foreign loanwords and not in native words: , , , , , , , and . These nine letters are also commonly used only in proper names. Unlike Arabic, the Persian language does not have pharyngealization at all. Although the letter is mainly used in Arabic loanwords, there are some native Persian words with this letter: , , etc. The pronunciation of these letters in Persian can differ from their pronunciation in Arabic. For example, the letter ث is pronounced as in Persian, while it is pronounced as in Arabic. +LetterPersianArabic/s//θ//h//ħ//z//ð//s//sˤ//z//dˤ//t//tˤ//z//ðˤ//ʔ//ʕ/ or /ɣ/
Overview table # Name(in Persian) Name(transliterated) Transliteration IPA UnicodeContextual forms Final Medial Initial Isolated0 Glottal stop U+0621 U+0623 U+0626 U+0624 1 U+0627 2 U+0628 3 U+067E 4 U+062A 5 / U+062B 6 / U+062C 7 U+0686 8 () / U+062D 9 U+062E 10 U+062F 11 / U+0630 12 U+0631 13 U+0632 14 U+0698 15 U+0633 16 U+0634 17 / U+0635 18 / U+0636 19 / U+0637 20 / U+0638 21 , / U+0639 22 , U+063A 23 U+0641 24 U+0642 25 U+06A9 26 U+06AF 27 U+0644 28 U+0645 29 U+0646 30 (in Farsi) / / / , , , (only word-finally) U+0648 (in Dari) / / / , , , 31 () , or and (word-finally) U+0647 32 / / / (Also / in Dari) , , ( / in Dari) U+06CC
Historically, in Early New Persian, there was a special letter for the sound . This letter is no longer used, as the -sound changed to , e.g. archaic /zaβān/ > 'language'.
Name(in Persian) Name(transliterated)Transliteration Sound Isolated form Final form Medial form Initial formڤ ve / / Another obsolete variant of the twenty-sixth letter is which used to appear in old manuscripts. Sound Isolated form Final form Medial form Initial form Name Another obsolete variant of the twenty-fifth letter is which used to appear in old manuscripts. Sound Isolated form Final form Medial form Initial form Name The archaic letter was also used as a substitute for the twenty-sixth letter of the Persian alphabet, , which was used to appear in the older manuscripts of Persian in the late 18th century to the early 19th century. Sound Isolated form Final form Medial form Initial form Name
Variants • Noto Nastaliq Urdu • Scheherazade • Lateef • Noto Naskh Arabic • Markazi Text • Noto Sans Arabic • Baloo Bhaijaan • El Messiri SemiBold • Lemonada Medium • Changa Medium • Mada • Noto Kufi Arabic • Reem Kufi • Lalezar • Jomhuria • Rakkas The alphabet in 16 fonts: Noto Nastaliq Urdu, Scheherazade, Lateef, Noto Naskh Arabic, Markazi Text, Noto Sans Arabic, Baloo Bhaijaan, El Messiri SemiBold, Lemonada Medium, Changa Medium, Mada, Noto Kufi Arabic, Reem Kufi, Lalezar, Jomhuria, and Rakkas.
Letter construction forms isolated start mid end i'jam Unicode 0621 .. 0627 .. 0649 .. 06BA .. 066E .. 062D .. 0633 .. 0635 .. 0637 .. 0639 .. 06A1 .. 066F .. 066F .. 0644 .. 0645 .. 062F .. 0631 .. 0648. .. 0647 .. 1 dot below Unicode FBB3. 0628 .. 062C .. 1 dot above Unicode FBB2. 0646 .. 062E .. 0636 .. 0638 .. 063A .. 0641 .. 0630 .. 0632 .. 2 dots below Unicode FBB5. 06CC .. 2 dots above Unicode FBB4. 062A .. 0642 .. 0629 .. 3 dots below Unicode FBB9. FBB7. 067E .. 0686 .. 3 dots above Unicode FBB6. 062B .. 0634 .. 0698 .. line above Unicode 203E. 06AF .. none Unicode 0621 .. 0627 .. 0649 .. 06BA .. 062D .. 0633 .. 0635 .. 0637 .. 0639 .. 066F .. 0644 .. 0645 .. 062F .. 0631 .. 0648. .. 0647 .. madda above Unicode 06E4. 0653. 0622 .. Hamza below Unicode 0655. 0625 .. Hamza above Unicode 0674. 0654. 0623 .. 0626 .. 0624 .. 06C0 ..
The i'jam diacritic characters are illustrative only; in most typesetting the combined characters in the middle of the table are used.
Persian yē has 2 dots below in the initial and middle positions only. The standard Arabic version always has 2 dots below.
Letters that do not link to a following letter Seven letters (, , , , , , ) do not connect to the following letter, unlike the rest of the letters of the alphabet. The seven letters have the same form in isolated and initial position and a second form in medial and final position. For example, when the letter is at the beginning of a word such as ("here"), the same form is used as in an isolated . In the case of ("today"), the letter takes the final form and the letter takes the isolated form, but they are in the middle of the word, and also has its isolated form, but it occurs at the end of the word.
Diacritics Persian script has adopted a subset of Arabic diacritics: ( in Arabic), ( in Arabic), and or ( in Arabic, pronounced in Western Persian), and (gemination). Other Arabic diacritics may be seen in Arabic loanwords in Persian.
Short vowels Of the four Arabic diacritics, the Persian language has adopted the following three for short vowels. Short vowels(fully vocalized text)Name(in Persian)Name(transliterated)Trans.Value (Farsi/Dari)064E/0650/; ; 064F/;
There is no standard transliteration for Persian. The letters 'i' and 'u' are only ever used as short vowels when transliterating Dari or Tajik Persian. See Persian Phonology
Diacritics differ by dialect, due to Dari having 8 distinct vowels compared to the 6 vowels of Farsi. See Persian Phonology
In Farsi, none of these short vowels may be the initial or final grapheme in an isolated word, although they may appear in the final position as an inflection, when the word is part of a noun group. In a word that starts with a vowel, the first grapheme is a silent which carries the short vowel, e.g. (, meaning "hope"). In a word that ends with a vowel, letters , and respectively become the proxy letters for , and , e.g. (, meaning "new") or (, meaning "package").
Tanvin (nunation)
Nunation (, ) is the addition of one of three vowel diacritics to a noun or adjective to indicate that the word ends in an alveolar nasal sound without the addition of the letter nun.
Nunation(fully vocalized text)Name(in Persian)Name(transliterated)Notes064B064DNever used in the Persian language. Taught in Islamic nations to complement Quran education.064C
Tašdid
SymbolName(in Persian)Name(transliteration)0651تشدید
Other characters The following are not actual letters but different orthographical shapes for letters, a ligature in the case of the . As to (hamza), it has only one graphical form since it is never tied to a preceding or following letter. However, it is sometimes 'seated' on a , or , and in that case, the seat behaves like an ordinary , or respectively. Technically, hamza is not a letter but a diacritic.
Name Pronunciation IPA Unicode Final Medial Initial Stand-alone Notes U+0622 — The final form is very rare and is freely replaced with ordinary alef. or U+06C0 — Validity of this form depends on region and dialect. Some may use the two-letter or combinations instead. U+0644 (lām) and U+0627 (alef) U+0640 — — This is the medial character which connects other characters
Although at first glance, they may seem similar, there are many differences in the way the different languages use the alphabets. For example, similar words are written differently in Persian and Arabic, as they are used differently.
Unicode has accepted in the Miscellaneous Symbols range."Miscellaneous Symbols". p. 4. The Unicode Standard, Version 13.0. Unicode.org In Unicode 1.0 this symbol was known as ."3.8 Block-by-block Charts" § Miscellaneous Dingbats p. 325 (155 electronically). The Unicode Standard Version 1.0. Unicode.org It is a stylization of () used as the emblem of Iran. It is also a part of the flag of Iran.
The Unicode Standard has a compatibility character defined that can represent , the Persian name of the currency of Iran.For the proposal, see It proposes the character under the name of , which was changed by the standard committees to .
Novel letters The Persian alphabet has four extra letters that are not in the Arabic alphabet: , (ch in chair), (s in measure), . An additional fifth letter was used for (v in Spanish ) but it is no longer used.
Sound Shape Name Unicode code point U+067E (ch) U+0686 (zh) U+0698 U+06AF
Deviations from the Arabic script