The Persian variety spoken in Afghanistan, sharing deep roots with Farsi while carrying its own vocabulary and pronunciation.
Farsi
The standard Persian variety spoken in Iran, with a rich literary tradition rooted in classical poetry and modern expression.
Shareable facts
Frequently asked questions
What language is Farsi?
Farsi is a dialect of the Persian language.
Where is Farsi spoken?
Farsi is primarily spoken in Iran.
Which region is Farsi associated with?
Farsi is part of the Middle East region on DialectAtlas.
How many people speak Farsi?
Farsi is spoken by approximately 70,000,000 people.
Is Farsi endangered?
Farsi is not currently classified as endangered. It has a stable speaker community with active intergenerational transmission.
What are the other dialects of Persian?
Persian also includes Dari, Tajik, Hazaragi, Kabuli, Herati. Each variety has its own vocabulary, pronunciation, and cultural context.
Other Persian dialects
See on the atlas →The Persian variety spoken in Tajikistan, written in Cyrillic script with unique vocabulary influenced by Central Asia.
A distinctive Persian dialect of the Hazara people, with its own verb forms, vocabulary, and cultural identity rooted in central Afghanistan.
Kabuli Persian · Kabuli Dari · Kābolī
The Dari variety of Kabul and the prestige basis of standard Afghan Persian as used in broadcast, government, and education. Sociolinguistically dominant across most of eastern and central Afghanistan, with several million speakers.
Herati Persian · Herati Dari · Herātī
The Dari of Herat and the Hari Rud valley in western Afghanistan. Transitional between Kabuli Dari and the Khorasani Persian of north-eastern Iran, with strong Iranian features in vocalism and lexicon. Around two million speakers.
Nearby dialects
See on the atlas →0 km away
Dom communities in Iran, historically referred to by various local names. Academic documentation of their speech is sparse.
266 km away
A southwestern Iranian language of the Bakhtiari tribal confederation in the central Zagros mountains. Sister to Luri, with a strong oral tradition tied to the seasonal migrations of pastoral life.
464 km away
A northwestern Iranian language of Iran's Caspian province of Mazandaran, around Sari and Babol. Closely related to Gilaki, with around three million speakers.
501 km away
A highly endangered Romani variety spoken in and around the village of Zargar in Qazvin province of north-western Iran, west of Tehran. The community is traditionally said to have been settled in the Safavid period and is one of the easternmost Romani-speaking populations on record; the dialect retains a Romani lexical core but shows heavy contact influence from Persian and Azerbaijani Turkish in phonology, vocabulary, and grammar. Speaker numbers are small and intergenerational transmission has weakened sharply.
511 km away
A southwestern Iranian language of the Lur people in Iran's western Zagros region. Closely related to Persian but linguistically distinct, with several million speakers across Lorestan, Khuzestan, and Ilam.
656 km away
A northwestern Iranian language spoken across Iran's Caspian province of Gilan around Rasht. Distinct from Persian in case marking and a richer verb system retaining older Iranian features.
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Sources & corpora
Data on Farsi from open scholarly databases. Each link opens the source in a new tab.
- Open in a new tabUD Persian Seraji Treebank
Universal Dependencies treebank for Iranian Persian (~6,000 sentences, 152k tokens) converted from the Uppsala Persian Dependency Treebank (Uppsala University / Universal Dependencies).
- Open in a new tabCHILDES — Family Persian Corpus
Audio + transcripts of two Tehran-Persian children recorded for L1 acquisition research (TalkBank / Carnegie Mellon).
- Open in a new tabNormalized Bijankhan Corpus
Normalized release of the Bijankhan Persian POS-tagged news corpus (~2.6M tokens) from the Database Research Group, University of Tehran (Tihu NLP / University of Tehran).