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This article contains Persian text. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols.

The Persian alphabet (Persian: الفبای فارسی‎, alefbā-ye fârsi), or Perso-Arabic alphabet, is a writing system used for the Persian language.

The Persian script is a modified version of the Arabic script. It is an abjad, meaning vowels are underrepresented in writing. The writing direction 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 letterforms. However, some Persian compounds do not join, and Persian adds four letters to the basic set for a total of 32 characters.

The replacement of the Pahlavi scripts with the Persian alphabet to write the Persian language was done by the Tahirid dynasty in 9th-century Greater Khorasan.^[1][2]

Letters

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.^[3]

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 ḥâ-ye ḥotti or ḥä-ye jimi (literally "jim-like ḥe" after jim, the name for the letter ج that uses the same base form) and hâ-ye havvaz or hâ-ye do-češm (literally "two-eyed he", after the contextual middle letterform ـهـ), respectively.

Overview table

Letters that do not link to a following letter

Seven letters (و, ژ, ز, ر, ذ, د, ا) do not connect to a 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 ("here"), the same form is used as in an isolated alef. In the case of امروز emruz ("today"), 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 /æ/ (fatḥah in Arabic), zir /e/ (kasrah in Arabic), and pish /ou̯/ or /o/ (ḍammah in Arabic, pronounced zamme in Western Persian), tanwīn e nasb /æn/ and shadda (gemination). Other Arabic diacritics may be seen in Arabic loanwords.

Short vowels

Of the four Arabic short vowels, the Persian language has adopted the following three. The last one, sukūn, is not adopted.

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 (omid, meaning "hope"). In a word that ends with a vowel, letters ع‎, ه‎ and و respectively become the proxy letters for zebar, zir and pish, e.g. نو (no, meaning "new") or بسته (bas-teh, meaning "package").

Tanvin (nunation)

Tashdid

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 (hamza), 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.

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 adds four letters to the Arabic alphabet: /p/, /ɡ/, /t͡ʃ/ (ch in chair), /ʒ/ (s in measure).

Deviations from the Arabic script

The shapes of the Persian digits four (۴), five (۵), and six (۶) are different from the shapes used in Arabic and the other numbers have different codepoints.^[5]

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.

See also

• Scripts used for Persian


• Persian braille


• 
  Nastaʿlīq, used to write Persian before the 20th century


• Abjad numerals


• Fingilish

References

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Persian alphabet.

• 
  Dastoor e khat - The Official document in Persian by Academy of Persian Language and Literature