Persian alphabet

The Persian alphabet (Template:Langx), 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: (the sounds 'g', 'zh', 'ch', and 'p', respectively), in addition to the obsolete that was used for the sound Template:IPAslink. This letter is no longer used in Persian, as the Template:IPAblink-sound changed to Template:IPAblink, e.g. archaic > 'language'. Although the sound Template:IPAslink () is written as "و" nowadays in Farsi (Dari-Parsi/New Persian), it is different to the Arabic Template:IPAslink (و) 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: 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 amongst 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: Template:Section link.

Letters

File:Persian Nastaʿlīq's proportions.jpg

Example showing the Nastaʿlīq calligraphic style's proportion rules

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 eight Persian letters that are mainly used in Arabic or foreign loanwords and not in native words: , , , , , , , and . These eight 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 Template:IPAslink in Persian, while it is pronounced as Template:IPAslink in Arabic.

Letter	Persian	Arabic
Template:Nq	/s/	/θ/
Template:Nq	/h/	/ħ/
Template:Nq	/z/	/ð/
ص	/s/	/sˤ/
ض	/z/	/dˤ/
ط	/t/	/tˤ/
ظ	/z/	/ðˤ/
ع	/ʔ/	/ʕ/
غ	Template:IPAblink or Template:IPAblink	/ɣ/

Overview table

#	Name (in Persian)	Name (transliterated)	Transliteration	IPA	Unicode	Contextual forms
						Final	Medial	Initial	Isolated
0				Glottal stop Template:IPAblink	U+0621	—	—	—
					U+0623
					U+0626
					U+0624
1				Template:IPAblink	U+0627
2				Template:IPAblink	U+0628
3				Template:IPAblink	U+067E
4				Template:IPAblink	U+062A
5			/	Template:IPAblink	U+062B
6			/	Template:IPAblink	U+062C
7				Template:IPAblink	U+0686
8		()	/	Template:IPAblink	U+062D
9				Template:IPAblink	U+062E
10				Template:IPAblink	U+062F
11			/	Template:IPAblink	U+0630
12				Template:IPAblink	U+0631
13				Template:IPAblink	U+0632
14				Template:IPAblink	U+0698
15				Template:IPAblink	U+0633
16				Template:IPAblink	U+0634
17			/	Template:IPAblink	U+0635
18			/	Template:IPAblink	U+0636
19			/	Template:IPAblink	U+0637
20			/	Template:IPAblink	U+0638
21				Template:IPAblink, Template:IPAblink/Template:IPAblink	U+0639
22				Template:IPAblink, Template:IPAblink	U+063A
23				Template:IPAblink	U+0641
24				Template:IPAblink	U+0642
25				Template:IPAblink	U+06A9
26				Template:IPAblink	U+06AF
27				Template:IPAblink	U+0644
28				Template:IPAblink	U+0645
29				Template:IPAblink	U+0646
30		(in Farsi)	/ / /	Template:IPAblink, , Template:IPAblink, Template:IPAblink (only word-finally)	U+0648
		(in Dari)	/ / /	Template:IPAblink, Template:IPAblink, , Template:IPAblink
31		()		Template:IPAblink, or Template:IPAblink and Template:IPAblink (word-finally)	U+0647
32			/ / / (Also / in Dari)	Template:IPAblink, Template:IPAblink, Template:IPAblink ( / Template:IPAblink in Dari)	U+06CC

Historically, in Early New Persian, there was a special letter for the sound Template:IPAslink. This letter is no longer used, as the -sound changed to Template:IPAslink, e.g. archaic /zaβān/ > 'language'.

Name (in Persian)	Name (transliterated)	Transliteration	Sound	Isolated form	Final form	Medial form	Initial form
ڤ	ve	/ /	Template:IPAslink

Another obsolete variant of the twenty-sixth letter Template:IPAslink is which used to appear in old manuscripts.

Sound	Isolated form	Final form	Medial form	Initial form	Name
Template:IPAslink

Another obsolete variant of the twenty-fifth letter Template:IPAslink is which used to appear in old manuscripts.

Sound	Isolated form	Final form	Medial form	Initial form	Name
Template:IPAslink

The archaic letter Template:IPAslink 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
Template:IPAslink

Variants

File:Farsi in 16 fonts 2020-03-22 213757.png	•	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 (i)	isolated
	start
	mid
	end
	i'jam (i)
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 (ii)
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 ..

^i. The i'jam diacritic characters are illustrative only; in most typesetting the combined characters in the middle of the table are used.

^ii. 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: Template:IPAslink ( in Arabic), Template:IPAslink ( in Arabic), and Template:IPAslink or Template:IPAslink ( in Arabic, pronounced in Western Persian), and (gemination). Other Arabic diacritics may be seen in Arabic loanwords in Persian.

180

Nastaliq Persian Calligram the Persian letter Mem

Short vowels

Of the four Arabic diacritics, the Persian language has adopted the following three for short vowels. The last one, sukūn, which indicates the lack of a vowel, has not been adopted.

Short vowels (fully vocalized text)	Name (in Persian)	Name (transliterated)	Trans.(a)	Value (b) (Farsi/Dari)
064E Template:Script/Arabic		/		Template:IPAslink	Template:IPAslink
0650 Template:Script/Arabic		/	;	Template:IPAslink	Template:IPAslink; Template:IPAslink
064F Template:Script/Arabic		/	;	Template:IPAslink	Template:IPAslink

^a. 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

^b. 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 (Template:Langx, ) 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)	Notes
064B Template:Script/Arabic
064D Template:Script/Arabic			Never used in the Persian language. Taught in Islamic nations to complement Quran education.
064C Template:Script/Arabic

Tašdid

Symbol	Name (in Persian)	Name (transliteration)
0651 Template:Script/Arabic	تشدید

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
		Template:IPAblink	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 Template:Unichar in the Miscellaneous Symbols range. In Unicode 1.0 this symbol was known as Template:Sc2. 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 Template:Unichar that can represent , the Persian name of the currency of Iran.

Novel letters

The Persian alphabet has four extra letters that are not in the Arabic alphabet: Template:IPAslink, Template:IPAslink (ch in chair), Template:IPAslink (s in measure), Template:IPAslink. An additional fifth letter was used for (v in Spanish ) but it is no longer used.

Sound	Shape	Name	Unicode code point
Template:IPAslink			U+067E
Template:IPAslink (ch)			U+0686
Template:IPAslink (zh)			U+0698
Template:IPAslink			U+06AF

Deviations from the Arabic script

Persian uses the Eastern Arabic numerals, but the shapes of the digits 'four' (), 'five' (), and 'six' () are different from the shapes used in Arabic. All the digits also have different codepoints in Unicode:

Hindu-Arabic	Persian	Name	Unicode	Arabic	Unicode
0	۰	صفر sefr	U+06F0	٠	U+0660
1	۱	يک yek	U+06F1	١	U+0661
2	۲	دو do	U+06F2	٢	U+0662
3	۳	سه se	U+06F3	٣	U+0663
4	۴	چهار čahâr	U+06F4	٤	U+0664
5	۵	پنج panj	U+06F5	٥	U+0665
6	۶	شش šeš	U+06F6	٦	U+0666
7	۷	هفت haft	U+06F7	٧	U+0667
8	۸	هشت hašt	U+06F8	٨	U+0668
9	۹	نه no	U+06F9	٩	U+0669
-	ی	ye	U+06CC	يTemplate:Efn	U+064A
	ک	kâf	U+06A9	ك	U+0643

Comparison of different numerals

Western Arabic	0	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
Eastern ArabicTemplate:Efn
PersianTemplate:Efn
UrduTemplate:Efn	Template:Urd	Template:Urd	Template:Urd	Template:Urd	Template:Urd	Template:Urd	Template:Urd	Template:Urd	Template:Urd	Template:Urd	Template:Urd
Abjad numerals

Word boundaries

Typically, words are separated from each other by a space. Certain morphemes (such as the plural ending '-hâ'), however, are written without a space. On a computer, they are separated from the word using the zero-width non-joiner.

Cyrillic Persian alphabet in Tajikistan

As part of the russification of Central Asia, the Cyrillic script was introduced in the late 1930s. The alphabet has remained Cyrillic since then. In 1989, with the growth in Tajik nationalism, a law was enacted declaring Tajik the state language. In addition, the law officially equated Tajik with Persian, placing the word Farsi (the endonym for the Persian language) after Tajik. The law also called for a gradual reintroduction of the Perso-Arabic alphabet.Template:Excessive citations inline

The Persian alphabet was introduced into education and public life, although the banning of the Islamic Renaissance Party in 1993 slowed adoption. In 1999, the word Farsi was removed from the state-language law, reverting the name to simply Tajik.^[1] since 2004Template:Dated maintenance category (articles) the de facto standard in use is the Tajik Cyrillic alphabet,^[2] and since 1996Template:Dated maintenance category (articles) only a very small part of the population can read the Persian alphabet.^[3]

See also

• Scripts used for Persian
• Romanization of Persian
• Persian braille
• Persian phonology
• Abjad numerals
• Nastaʿlīq, the calligraphy used to write Persian before the 20th century

External links

• Dastoore khat – The Official document in Persian by Academy of Persian Language and Literature