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Perso-Arab


The Persian alphabet (Persian: الفبای فارسی‎, UniPers: Alefbâye Fârsi), or Perso-Arabic alphabet, is a writing system used for the Persian language.

The Persian script shares many features with other systems based on the Arabic script. It is an abjad, meaning vowels are underrepresented in writing. The writing direction is exclusively right-to-left. The script is cursive, meaning most letters in a word connect to each other; when typed, the computer automatically joins adjacent letterforms. However, some Persian compounds do not join, and Persian adds four letters to the basic set for a total of 32 characters.

The replacement of the Pahlavi scripts with the Persian alphabet to write the Persian language was done by the Tahirid dynasty in 9th-century Greater Khorasan.

Below are the 32 letters of the modern Persian alphabet. Since the script is cursive, the appearance of a letter changes depending on its position: isolated, initial (joined on the left), medial (joined on both sides) and final (joined on the right) of a word.

The names of the letter are mostly the ones used in Arabic except for the Persian pronunciation. The only ambiguous name is he, which is used for both ح and ه. For clarification, they are often called ḥe-ye jimi (literally "jim-like ḥe" after jim, the name for the letter ج that uses the same base form) and he-ye do-češm (literally "two-eyed he", after the contextual middle letterform ـهـ), respectively.

Seven letters (و, ژ, ز, ر, ذ, د, ا) do not connect to a following letter, unlike the rest of the letters of the alphabet. The seven letters have the same form in isolated and initial position and a second form in medial and final position. For example, when the letter ا "alef" is at the beginning of a word such as اینجا "injā" (here), the same form is used as in an isolated "alef". In the case of امروز "emruz" (today), the letter ر "re" takes the final form and the letter و "vāv" takes the isolated form, but they are in the middle of the word, and ز also has its isolated form, but it occurs at the end of the word.


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