The Mazandarani Alphabet

Mazandarani — also called Tabari or Mazanderani — is a Caspian Northwestern Iranian language spoken by approximately 3–4 million people in Mazandaran Province and Golestan Province along the southern Caspian Sea coast of northern Iran.

The name "Mazandarani" is the modern geographic name based on the province of Mazandaran, and it is the name most commonly used by native speakers in everyday speech. "Tabari" is the classical historical name, derived from Tabaristan — the ancient designation for the same region. Both names refer to exactly the same language.

The Mazandarani alphabet has 32 letters, all derived from the Perso-Arabic script. The 32 letters include the 28 Arabic letters 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 Mazandarani text but can be indicated with optional diacritical marks called harakat. Mazandarani's spoken vowel inventory is actually richer than Persian, with distinctions that go unrepresented in the standard script — a common limitation of the Perso-Arabic abjad for non-Persian Iranian languages.

Mazandarani and Tabari refer to the same language. "Mazandarani" is the modern geographic name, derived from Mazandaran Province where the language is primarily spoken, and it is the name most commonly used by native speakers in daily life. "Tabari" is the classical name, derived from Tabaristan — the ancient name for the Mazandaran region.

In ISO 639-3, the language is assigned the code mzn under the name "Mazanderani". Both names appear interchangeably in academic and linguistic literature. The language has also been called Tapuri, Tabari-Mazanderani, and Caspian Mazanderani in various scholarly works. Native speakers typically use "Mazanderani" (مازرونی) in ordinary speech.

Mazandarani is spoken primarily in Mazandaran Province and Golestan Province along the southern Caspian Sea coast of northern Iran. These provinces together form the historical Tabaristan region. The language is also spoken in diaspora communities in Tehran and other major Iranian cities.

With approximately 3–4 million speakers, Mazandarani is one of the most widely spoken regional languages of Iran. Despite this large speaker base, the language remains vulnerable due to the dominance of Persian (Farsi) in education, media, and official communication across Iran.

Mazandarani and Gilaki are each other's closest living relatives, both belonging to the Caspian subgroup of Northwestern Iranian. They are spoken in adjacent provinces — Mazandarani in Mazandaran and Golestan to the east, Gilaki in Gilan to the west — and share many distinctive Caspian features including a richer vowel inventory than Persian, similar verb morphology, and shared core vocabulary.

Despite these similarities, Mazandarani and Gilaki are distinct languages rather than dialects of the same tongue. The two are not fully mutually intelligible, and they diverged sufficiently in phonology, vocabulary, and grammatical detail to be classified separately in ISO 639-3 (Mazandarani: mzn; Gilaki: glk). Both are considered vulnerable to language shift toward Persian.

No. Mazandarani and Persian are both Iranian languages but belong to different subgroups. Persian (Farsi) is a Southwest Iranian language, while Mazandarani belongs to the Northwestern Iranian Caspian subgroup. They diverged from Proto-Iranian thousands of years ago and follow different phonological and grammatical developments.

Despite this, Mazandarani has been heavily influenced by Persian over centuries of proximity, sharing much of its vocabulary, using the Persian script, and absorbing Persian administrative and cultural terminology. Many Mazandarani speakers are bilingual in Persian. However, Mazandarani's richer vowel system, ergative morphological features, and distinctive Caspian vocabulary mark it as a clearly independent language rather than a dialect of Persian.

Yes. Like all Perso-Arabic scripts, Mazandarani 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 only exception to the right-to-left direction is numerals, which are written left to right even within otherwise RTL text. Mazandarani uses Eastern Arabic-Indic numerals (۰–۹) standard across the Persian writing system of Iran. The script belongs to the Arabic Unicode Block (U+0600–U+06FF).