The Hazaragi Alphabet

The Hazaragi alphabet has 32 letters, all derived from the Perso-Arabic script shared with Dari, Afghanistan's official language. The 32 letters include the 28 letters of the Arabic alphabet plus 4 letters unique to Persian and Dari: پ (pe, /p/), چ (che, /tʃ/), ژ (zhe, /ʒ/), and گ (gaf, /g/).

Short vowels are generally not written in everyday Hazaragi text but can be indicated with optional diacritical marks called harakat. The Perso-Arabic script is an abjad — a consonant-based writing system in which the reader supplies the short vowels from context, a tradition shared across Arabic, Persian, Dari, and Hazaragi literacy.

Hazaragi is the language of the Hazara people, one of Afghanistan's largest ethnic groups, spoken across the central highland region of Hazarajat (including Bamyan, Daykundi, and Ghazni provinces) and in Afghan cities including Kabul. With approximately 2–3 million speakers, it is among the most widely spoken languages of Afghanistan.

Hazaragi is classified as a variety of the Iranian branch of Indo-Iranian languages, closely related to Dari Persian — Afghanistan's official language. While mutually intelligible with Dari to a significant degree, Hazaragi has its own distinctive vocabulary, phonological features, and grammar patterns, including archaic Persian words preserved in the Hazarajat highlands and Mongolian or Turkic loanwords reflecting the Hazara people's historical heritage.

Although Hazaragi uses the same 32-letter Perso-Arabic script as Dari and is closely related to it, several features distinguish Hazaragi from standard Kabuli Dari. Hazaragi preserves archaic Persian vocabulary that has been replaced by newer forms in standard Dari, reflecting the relative isolation of Hazarajat communities over centuries in the Afghan highlands.

Hazaragi also contains a significant layer of Mongolian and Turkic loanwords — particularly in vocabulary related to animals, traditional tools, military terms, and cultural practices — that are not found in standard Dari. These loanwords are a linguistic legacy of the Hazara people's complex historical origins. In addition, Hazaragi phonology, verbal morphology, and certain grammatical constructions show distinctive patterns not present in standard Kabuli Dari.

Hazaragi is spoken primarily across the Hazarajat region of central Afghanistan, encompassing provinces such as Bamyan, Daykundi, Ghazni, and parts of Wardak, Baghlan, and Sar-e Pol. The Hazara people also constitute a large portion of the population of Kabul, where Hazaragi is widely spoken alongside Dari. The city of Mazar-i-Sharif also has a substantial Hazara community.

Outside Afghanistan, significant Hazaragi-speaking diaspora communities are found in Pakistan (particularly in Quetta, Balochistan) and Iran, where Hazara migration over the past century has created large expatriate communities. Hazaragi communities are also established in Australia, the United Kingdom, and other Western countries following decades of displacement from Afghanistan's conflicts.

Yes. Like all Perso-Arabic scripts, Hazaragi is written and read from right to left. Each letter connects to adjacent letters within a word (cursive), and most letters change shape depending on their position — initial, medial, final, or isolated form. The script belongs to the Arabic Unicode Block (U+0600–U+06FF) and is identical to the Dari script used in Afghan government and media.

The only exception to the right-to-left direction is numerals, which are written left to right even within otherwise RTL text. Hazaragi uses the same Eastern Arabic-Indic digits (۰–۹) as Dari Persian, which are standard across Afghan publications and educational materials. Digital Hazaragi text follows standard Unicode bidirectional text rules.

The linguistic origins of Hazaragi are closely tied to the history of the Hazara people, who settled primarily in central Afghanistan. Hazaragi is at its core a Persian/Dari dialect with deep roots in the Eastern Persian tradition of the Afghan highlands — the language of the Persianate cultures that have inhabited the region since the medieval period.

The Hazaragi lexicon also contains significant borrowings from Mongolian and Turkic languages, reflecting the period of the Mongol Empire's expansion into Central Asia during the 13th century. These Mongolian-origin words are particularly evident in vocabulary related to animals, tools, and military organisation. Over subsequent centuries, Hazaragi developed as a distinct dialect in the geographically isolated Hazarajat highlands, preserving archaic features of older Persian while incorporating these Mongolian and Turkic elements into its unique vocabulary.