Dari

Where it’s spoken

Dari (دری) is one of two official languages of Afghanistan, alongside Pashto, and serves as the country’s main lingua franca. It is the mother tongue of the Tajik people in Afghanistan and is widely spoken by Hazaras, Aimaqs, and other groups. The 1964 constitution gave Persian-language speech in Afghanistan the official name “Dari” to distinguish it from Iranian Farsi.

What it sounds like

Dari preserves older Persian pronunciation features that Iranian Farsi has lost — for instance, the diphthongs aw and ay survive where Iranian has shifted them, and the distinction between long ē/i and ō/u persists. Dari’s stress and intonation patterns also differ from Tehrani Farsi.

How it’s written

Dari is written in the same Persian-Arabic script as Iranian Farsi, with 32 letters. The Nastaliq calligraphic style is used for literary texts and decorative writing; Naskh is common for everyday print. Short vowels are usually unmarked.

History

Dari is the direct descendant of Classical Persian (Pārsī-yi Darī, “court Persian”), which was the literary language of Khorasan and the Samanid court (10th century). The great Persian poets Rumi, Saadi, and Hafez wrote in a Persian very close to modern Dari.