The Persian alphabet is an Arabic-based script with four distinct, non-Arabic letter additions.

Cultures · Published 30 September 2026 Swipe more like this →

In short: While the Persian alphabet shares its roots and most characters with the Arabic script, it is a distinct system. It incorporates four unique letters to accommodate Persian phonology and has evolved through centuries of imperial influence, cultural shifts, and even government-mandated reforms in Central Asia.

The Persian alphabet, or Perso-Arabic script, emerged following the 7th-century Muslim conquest of Persia and the collapse of the Sasanian Empire. As Arabic became the primary language of administration and religion, its script gradually displaced the earlier Pahlavi systems. By the 9th century, this adaptation was firmly established across Greater Khorasan, serving as a foundation for many other languages in Central and South Asia, including Urdu, Pashto, and Kurdish.

Structurally, the alphabet consists of 32 letters. It retains 28 characters from the Arabic alphabet but adds four specific letters—پ (p), چ (ch), ژ (zh), and گ (g)—to represent sounds not found in Arabic. Historically, an additional letter, ڤ, was used for the /β/ sound, but this has since become obsolete as the sound shifted to /b/. Unlike Arabic, Persian lacks pharyngealization, and the pronunciation of shared letters often diverges; for instance, the letter ث is pronounced as /s/ in Persian rather than the Arabic /θ/.

The script is primarily written from right to left, though it uniquely embeds mathematical expressions and numeric digits from left to right. It is a cursive system where letter forms change based on their position—isolated, initial, medial, or final. Seven specific letters do not connect to those that follow them, a feature that influences word structure. Furthermore, Persian uses a zero-width non-joiner to manage spacing between certain morphemes, a technical necessity for modern word processing.

The alphabet's history is also marked by political change. In Tajikistan, the Soviet government introduced a Cyrillic-based system in the late 1930s as part of a broader russification effort. Although a 1989 law attempted to reintroduce the Perso-Arabic script, the Cyrillic alphabet remains the de facto standard today, with only a small fraction of the population currently literate in the traditional Persian script.

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