The Tabari Alphabet

The Tabari 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 Tabari text but can be indicated with optional diacritical marks called harakat. Tabari'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.

Tabari — also called Mazandarani or Mazanderani — 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, from which the language takes its classical name.

With approximately 3–4 million speakers, Tabari is one of the most widely spoken regional languages of Iran. Tabari-speaking diaspora communities also exist in Tehran, other major Iranian cities, and internationally. Despite this large speaker base, the language remains vulnerable due to the dominance of Persian (Farsi) in education, media, and official communication.

Tabari and Mazandarani refer to the same language. "Tabari" is the classical name, derived from Tabaristan — the ancient name for the Mazandaran region. "Mazandarani" is the modern geographical name, based on the province of Mazandaran where the language is primarily spoken.

Both names are used interchangeably in linguistics. In ISO 639-3, the language is assigned the code mzn under the name "Mazanderani". Native speakers typically call their language Mazanderani (مازرونی) in everyday speech, while Tabari is more common in historical and academic contexts. The language has also been called Tapuri, Tabari-Mazanderani, and Caspian Mazanderani in various scholarly works.

Tabari and Persian are both Iranian languages but belong to different subgroups. Persian (Farsi) is a Southwest Iranian language, while Tabari 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, Tabari 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 Tabari speakers are bilingual in Persian, contributing to language shift. However, Tabari'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. Tabari and Gilaki are each other's closest living relatives, both belonging to the Caspian subgroup of Northwestern Iranian. They are spoken in adjacent provinces — Tabari 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, Tabari 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 (Tabari: mzn; Gilaki: glk). Both are considered vulnerable to language shift toward Persian.

Yes. Like all Perso-Arabic scripts, Tabari 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. Tabari 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).