Dari Alphabet

The Dari alphabet has 32 letters ^[1] in the Nastaliq Perso-Arabic script — the 28 standard Arabic letters plus four unique to Persian and Dari: پ (pa), چ (che), ژ (zhe), and گ (gaf).

The script is written right to left, and most letters change shape depending on their position at the start, middle, or end of a word.

Dari is spoken natively by approximately 12 million people in Afghanistan ^[2]. Millions more Afghans speak it as a second language, making it the most widely used lingua franca across the country.

Large Dari-speaking diaspora communities also live in Pakistan, Iran, and Western countries following decades of conflict and migration.

Dari is mutually intelligible with Iranian Persian (Farsi) and Tajik ^[3] — all three are varieties of New Persian descended from Middle Persian. The differences are comparable to American English versus British English.

Key differences include some vocabulary items, pronunciation of certain vowels, and grammatical preferences. Written Dari and written Persian are largely identical.

The term "Barbari" appears in some eastern historical sources referring to the Persian spoken in and around Afghanistan ^[2]. The name "Dari" is thought to derive from "darbār" (royal court), reflecting its prestige in the Sasanian and Islamic courts of eastern Persia.

Today, "Dari" is the official name used by the Afghan government. The ISO 639-3 code for Dari is prs (Persian, Southern).

Dari serves as co-official language and main lingua franca of Afghanistan ^[2]. While Pashto is co-official, Dari is more widely used in government, universities, media, and commerce.

It acts as a bridge language between Afghanistan's many ethnic groups — Hazara, Tajik, Uzbek, and others — and most official documents and Afghan literature are written in Dari.

Dari uses all 28 letters of the Arabic alphabet ^[1], plus 4 additional letters (پ، چ، ژ، گ). However, several Arabic letters that represent distinct sounds in Arabic are pronounced identically in Dari.

For example, the four Arabic emphatic consonants (ص، ض، ط، ظ) all merge into plain counterparts in Dari speech, though all 28 letters are kept in the orthography for historical and religious reasons.

Both use the same Arabic Unicode block and right-to-left directionality ^[1], but Dari (like Persian and Urdu) uses the Nastaliq calligraphic style with a distinctive slanted flow — quite different from the Naskh style used in standard Arabic printing.

Additionally, Dari uses four Persian letters (پ، چ، ژ، گ) and the Eastern Arabic numerals ۰–۹, which differ slightly in shape from Western Arabic numerals.

Yes — the Persian literary tradition that Dari belongs to is one of the world's greatest ^[3]. Classical poets like Rumi, Hafez, and Ferdowsi wrote in Persian — the same literary language Dari descends from.

Afghanistan's own literary heritage includes Rabi'a Balkhi (10th century), Khushal Khan Khattak, and the Sufi poets of Herat. Modern Dari literature continues in novels, poetry, and journalism.