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فارسی Persian; Farsi
Family	Sub-family	Language of	Script
Indo-European	Iranian	Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan	Perso-Arabic Cyrillic

The Persian writing system derives from that of Arabic, extended with four letters to denote the sounds not found in Arabic. Persian writing system is not an alphabet but an abjad. This means that in Persian vowels are not fully written. An abjad has only characters for denoting consonant sounds. Vowels have no specific character; they are indicated either by certain diacritics or by certain consonant characters.

Vowels

The following table shows the 6 vowels (and one of the diphthongs) of Iranian Persian and their Iranian spelling. The three dialects of Persian (Tajik, Iranian, Dari) all derive their vowels from the 8 vowels of New Persian, consequently they all have slightly different vowel inventories and spellings.

Note that as with Arabic, no vowel can begin a word. It must be preceded by consonant. In order to spell a word whose first sound is a vowel, the silent letter alif (and often ayn in Arabic loans) must start the word.

Since the three short vowels are marked as diacritics in the Persio-Arabic script, in the following table the letter dal د is used to demonstrate the placement of the diacritics. Note that in actual practice these diacritics are never used and are found only in text books.

Script	Transcription	IPA
دَ	a	æ
ا	â	ɒː
دِ	e	e
ى	i	iː
دُ	o	o
و	u	uː
دُو	ow	/oː/ in Iranian Persian

Consonants

The following table details the consonant letters of Perisan along with their pronunciations and romanisations. The romanisation used on this wiki differs slightly from the standard Iranian because

• the use of digraphs ending on h can cause confusion
• although ق and غ are pronounced the same in Iranian persian, they are distinct in all other dialects and both are used in classical persian vocabulary.

unlike ص ض ط ظ ذ ث ح which came to Persian through Arabic but didn't represent distinct phonemes.

Note that there are characters that denote identical sounds:

ض ظ ذ who all sound like ز /z/.

ص ث who sound like س /s/

ط who sounds like ت /t/

ح tho sounds like ه /h/

This is because Persian has preserved the spelling of Arabic loanwords and used arabic letters in some native words. Each of these characters has a unique sound in Arabic but they are all pronounced the same in Persian. Although it is technically possible to represent each persian letter with a separate glyph, there's very little ambiguity with homophonic consonants, and such a romanisation system would be ungainly.

Character	Romanisation	IPA	Description
ا	â or aa or nothing	/ɒː/.	word initially ا is silent and holds vowels in which case it is un-marked in romanisation
آ	â or aa or ʔâ	/ɒː/	word initially it takes the /ɒː/ pronunciation but within words from Arabic sounds like /ʔɒː/
ب	b	b
پ	p	p
ت	t	t
ث	s	s
ج	j	dʒ
چ	č, c or ch	tʃ
ح	h	h
خ	x or kh	x
ر	r	r
ز	z	z
ژ	ž or zh	ʒ
س	s	s
ش	š or sh	ʃ
ص	s	s
ض	z	z
ط	t	t
ظ	z	z
ع	'	ʔ	in some dialects ayn lengthens a preceding vowel. Word initially ع is silent and holds vowels
غ	ġ or gh	/ɣ/	but /ɢ/ word initially in Iranian Persian
ف	f	f
ق	q	ɢ	but /ɣ/ when not word initial in Iranian Persian
ک	k	k
گ	g	g
ل	l	l
م	m	m
ن	n	n
و	u & v or w	traditionally /w/	/v/ in Iranian Persian except at the end of stems or often after the short vowel /o/; also represents /uː/. In iranian persian many verbs begin with حو which used to represent /xw/ but today has a silent و. E.g. خوُردَن /xordæn/ (to eat) nonetheless it is still written in the romanisation
ى	i & y	/j/ and /iː/
ه	h	h	but often silent at the end of a word especially after the short vowel /e/ e.g. بَلِه /bale/ (yes)
ء	ʔ	ʔ	hamza is used only in arabic loans and represents a glottal stop. In most dialects it sounds the same as ayn.

Persian pages
Introduction · Sounds and Writing

Iranian Languages
Eastern	Ossetian · Pashto · Yaghnobi · Yidgha
Western	Dari · Persian