Romanization of Persian

Romanization of Persian or Latinization of Persian is the representation of the Persian language (Farsi, Dari and Tajik) with the Latin script. Several different romanization schemes exist, each with its own set of rules driven by its own set of ideological goals.

Because the Perso-Arabic script is an abjad writing system (with a consonant-heavy inventory of letters), many distinct words in standard Persian can have identical spellings, with widely varying pronunciations that differ in their (unwritten) vowel sounds. Thus a romanization paradigm can follow either transliteration (which mirrors spelling and orthography) or transcription (which mirrors pronunciation and phonology).

The Latin script plays in Iran the role of a second script. For the proof of this assertion it is sufficient to take a look at the city and street signs or the Internet addresses in all countries. On the other hand, experience has shown that efforts to teach millions of Iranian young people abroad in reading and writing Persian mostly prove to be unsuccessful, due to the lack of daily contact with the Persian script. It seems that a way out of this dilemma has been found; and that is the use of the Latin script parallel to the Persian script.

Transliteration (in the strict sense) attempts to be a complete representation of the original writing, so that an informed reader should be able to reconstruct the original spelling of unknown transliterated words. Transliterations of Persian are used to represent individual Persian words or short quotations, in scholarly texts in English or other languages that do not use the Arabic alphabet.

A transliteration will still have separate representations for different consonants of the Persian alphabet that are pronounced identically in Persian. Therefore, transliterations of Persian are often based on transliterations of Arabic. The representation of the vowels of the Perso-Arabic alphabet is also complex, and transliterations are based on the written form.

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