Persian alphabet


The Persian alphabet or Perso-Arabic alphabet is a writing system used for the Persian language spoken in Iran and Afghanistan. The Persian language spoken in Tajikistan is written in the Tajik alphabet, a modified version of Cyrillic alphabet since the Soviet era.
The Modern Persian script is directly derived and developed from Arabic script. After the Muslim conquest of Persia and the fall of Sasanian Empire in the 7th century, Arabic became the language of government and especially religion in Persia for two centuries.
The replacement of the Pahlavi scripts with the Persian alphabet to write the Persian language was done by the Saffarid dynasty and Samanid dynasty in 9th-century Greater Khorasan. It 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.

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, medial and final of a word.
The names of the letter are mostly the ones used in Arabic except for the Persian pronunciation. The only ambiguous name is he, which is used for both ح and ه. For clarification, they are often called ḥä-ye jimi and hâ-ye do-češm, respectively.

Overview table

variants

Letter construction

The i'jam diacritic characters are illustrative only, in most typesetting the combined characters in the middle of the table are used.
Farsi Yē has 2 dots below in the initial and middle positions only. The standard Arabic version ي يـ ـيـ ـي 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 ا alef is at the beginning of a word such as اینجا injâ, the same form is used as in an isolated alef. In the case of امروز emruz, the letter ر re takes the final form and the letter و vâv takes the isolated form, but they are in the middle of the word, and ز also has its isolated form, but it occurs at the end of the word.

Diacritics

Persian script has adopted a subset of Arabic diacritics: zebar , zir , and piš or , tanwīne nasb and šaddah. Other Arabic diacritics may be seen in Arabic loanwords in Persian.

Short vowels

Of the four Arabic short vowels, the Persian language has adopted the following three. The last one, sukūn, has not been adopted.
Short vowels
Name
Name
Trans.Value
064E
زبر
zebar/zibara ;
0650
زیر
zer/zire
064F
پیش
peš/pišo

In Iranian Persian, 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 alef which carries the short vowel, e.g. اُمید. In a word that ends with a vowel, letters ع, ه and و respectively become the proxy letters for zebar, zir and piš, e.g. نو or بسته.

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
Name
Name
Notes
064B
تنوین نَصْبْTanvine nasb
064D
تنوین جَرّTanvine jarrNever used in the Persian language.
Taught in Islamic nations to
complement Quran education.
064C
تنوین رَفْعْTanvine rafʔNever used in the Persian language.
Taught in Islamic nations to
complement Quran education.

Tašdid

SymbolName
Name
0651
تشدیدtašdid

Other characters

The following are not actual letters but different orthographical shapes for letters, a ligature in the case of the lâm alef. As to ﺀ, it has only one graphic since it is never tied to a preceding or following letter. However, it is sometimes 'seated' on a vâv, ye or alef, and in that case, the seat behaves like an ordinary vâv, ye or alef respectively. Technically, hamza is not a letter but a diacritic.
NamePronunciationIPAUnicodeFinalMedialInitialStand-aloneNotes
alef maddeâU+0622ـآ—آآThe final form is very rare and is freely replaced with ordinary alef.
he ye-eye or -eyehU+06C0ـۀ——ۀValidity of this form depends on region and dialect. Some may use the three-letter ـه‌ای combination instead.
lām aleflāU+0644 and U+0627 ـلا——لا
kašidaU+0640—ـ——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.

Novel letters

The Persian alphabet has four extra letters that are not in the Arabic alphabet:,, , .
SoundShapeUnicode nameUnicode code point
پpeU+067E
چčeU+0686
ژžeU+0698
گgâfU+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:
NamePersianUnicodeArabicUnicode
0۰U+06F0٠U+0660
1۱U+06F1١U+0661
2۲U+06F2٢U+0662
3۳U+06F3٣U+0663
4۴U+06F4٤U+0664
5۵U+06F5٥U+0665
6۶U+06F6٦U+0666
7۷U+06F7٧U+0667
8۸U+06F8٨U+0668
9۹U+06F9٩U+0669
yeیU+06CCيU+064A
kāfکU+06A9كU+0643

Word boundaries

Typically, words are separated from each other by a space. Certain morphemes, 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 remained Cyrillic until the end of the 1980s with the disintegration of the Soviet Union. 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 after Tajik. The law also called for a gradual reintroduction of the Perso-Arabic alphabet.
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. the de facto standard in use is the Tajik Cyrillic alphabet, and only a very small part of the population can read the Persian alphabet.