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.
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.
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).