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Persian Alphabet (Arabic)

The letters and characters of Persian written in the Arabic script, in order — every standard character with its name and codepoint, the additional and punctuation sets, and exactly how many fonts include them. About 89,208,446 people read or write it across 9 countries.

Standard characters

The minimal set of characters required for Persian — the language's alphabet, in its traditional order. Tap a character to copy it; each name opens the full character page.

How the Persian alphabet works

Persian is written from right to left in the Arabic script, with the same joined-up letterforms — most letters change shape depending on whether they begin, continue or end a word, and the chart shows the standing-alone shapes. Persian keeps the full Arabic set and adds four letters of its own for sounds Arabic lacks: پ (p), چ (ch), ژ (zh, the s in measure) and گ (g). Vowels are handled the Arabic way: long vowels are written with letters, short ones mostly are not — the small marks for a, e and o appear in children's books and dictionaries, and the reader supplies them elsewhere.

The great simplification is what Persian did to the Arabic sounds. Arabic made fine distinctions that Persian ears never had, so whole families of letters collapsed into single sounds: ث, س and ص are all plain s; ذ, ض, ظ and ز are all z; ت and ط are both t; ح and ه are both h. For spelling this is a burden — a word's s might be any of three letters, and you learn which by heart — but for reading aloud it is a gift: see a letter and its sound is settled, with the merged letters noted in the chart.

Three letters do more than one job. و (vav) is the consonant v, the long vowel u and the vowel o; ی (ye) is y at the start of a word and long i elsewhere; ه (he) is h, but at the end of a word it usually falls silent and is read e. The letter ع, so formidable in Arabic, is tamed here to a mere catch in the throat or a pause that lengthens the vowel before it. Persian also rounds its long a toward o — the alef sounds closer to the a of father said with rounded lips.

Additional Characters

Used for foreign words, names and technical terms, and older forms of the language.

Punctuation characters

The marks used to separate sentences and to clarify meaning.

Where Persian (Arabic) is read

Countries shaded by the share of their population that reads or writes Persian in the Arabic script. The map is zoomed to the region where at least 1% of a country's people read it; neighbouring countries are shown unshaded for context.