Persian

Joining forms

Because the Arabic script is 'cursive' (ie. joined-up) writing, letters tend to have different shapes depending on whether they join with adjacent letters or not (see cursive). In addition, vowels can be represented using different characters, depending on where in a word they appear.

In scripts such as Arabic, several characters have no left-joining form. In what follows we'll use the characters ي and د to illustrate shapes. The former can join on both sides, but the latter can only join on the right.

Left-joining glyphs are commonly called initial; dual-joining are called medial; and right-joining are called final. Glyphs that don't join on either side are called isolated. However, these glyph shapes can be found in various places within a single word.

Word-initial characters usually have initial glyph shapes (eg. 064A ). However, characters that only join to the right will use an isolated glyph shape (eg. 062F ). Furthermore, words beginning with a vowel are always preceded by a vowel carrier, which is normally ا (eg. 0627 06CC or 0627 064E ).

Word-medial characters will typically join on both sides (eg. 064A ) but those that only join to the right will use a final glyph (eg. 062F ). However, if either of those is preceded by another character that only joins to the right, the glyph shapes rendered will be initial (eg. 064A ) and isolated (eg. 062F ), respectively.

In Persian, final glyph forms can also be found in word-medial even though the character would normally join to the left, usually at morphological boundaries, eg. گرگ‌ها . The left joining behaviour is prevented using 200C.

Word-final characters will typically use a final glyph shape (eg. 064A and 062F ). However, if the previous character joins only to the right, they will use isolated glyph shapes (eg.064A and 062F ).

In all this contextual glyph shaping the basic shapes used for a character can vary significantly in a script like Arabic. This also includes some characters that only have ijam dots in certain contexts.

Letters

Combining marks

Numbers

Punctuation

Symbols

Other

Vowel sounds

There are 6 vowel sounds, though there are also allophonic variants. The basic phonemes are as follows:

i, u, and ɒ are regarded as long vowels. e, o, and æ are short.

Consonant sounds

	labial	dental	alveolar	post- alveolar	palatal	velar	uvular	glottal
stop	p b	t d				k ɡ	ɢ	ʔ
affricate				t͡ʃ d͡ʒ
fricative	f v		s z	ʃ ʒ		x ɣ		h
nasal	m		n
approximant			l		j
trill/flap			r

In Iranian Persian ɣ and q have merged into ɣ~ɢ, as a voiced velar fricative ɣ when positioned intervocalically and unstressed, and as a voiced uvular stop ɢ otherwise.wpl,#Phonology

Tone

Persian is not a tonal language.

Structure

tbd

Vowel summary table

The following table summarises the main vowel to character assignments, in both vowelled and unvowelled forms.

Each table cell shows word-initial, word-medial, and word-final forms from right to left. The glyphs shown are illustrative; alternative shapes may occur (see joining_forms).

For additional details see vowel_mappings.

In normal (non-vocalised) text a vowel location is simply not indicated where only a diacritic is shown in the table. Because the sukun is also dropped in non-vocalised text, where a mater lectionis remains it only implies a vowel location, since it may alternatively represent a consonant or a glide.

In word-initial position vowels are attached to ا.

Initial u is rare, as are final æ and o.

Final 0647 and 0648 are only treated as vowels if they follow a consonant sound. If they follow a vowel sound, they revert to their normal consonant value. Unfortunately, since short vowels are only rarely shown, it can sometimes be difficult to tell from the written text whether to pronounce these letters as vowel or consonant.

This is the full set of characters needed to represent the Persian language vowels.

Vowel diacritics

In situations where it is necessary to unambiguously indicate the underlying vowel sounds, the following diacritics can be added to base letters.

Matres lectionis

Persian is normally written without vowel diacritics. As a rule, only long vowels are represented by matres lectionis, except that all vowels in word-initial position are written with or preceded by ا [U+0627 ARABIC LETTER ALEF]. Another exception is a final e, which is written with ه [U+0647 ARABIC LETTER HEH]. (Final a and o are also represented by a consonant, but are rarely found.)

The table shows what sounds each letter may represent in non-vocalised text. Where there are gaps, the sound is just not written.

The vowels e oand æ are not marked in medial position, and with the exception of e generally do not occur in word-final position. However, one common word in the Tehran dialect of Persian that does end with æ is نه næ no

آ [U+0622 ARABIC LETTER ALEF WITH MADDA ABOVE] is included in the table because it is normally represented by a single, precomposed character.

See also vowel_mappings.

Ezafe

Ezāfe is a grammatical particle used to link words together. It is used between adjectives and nouns. Between a sequence of nouns it is similar in use to the word 'de' in French. It is pronounced ɛ~e or (after a vowel) jɛ.

Ezafe can be written in three ways in vowelled text, however in normal Persian text only the third is visible, because the diacritics are omitted.pm,41

Standalone vowels

Word-medial Persian vowels are sometimes pronounced without an intervening consonant, but they are normally written as if they are separated by a glottal stop. The glottal stop is written using a hamza and its carrier (see hamza).

زئوس

سؤال

Word-initial standalone vowels are always attached to or preceded by 0627, eg.

اومدن

ایرانی

Vowel length

Long vowels are generally distinguished from short vowels by the use of matres lectionis (see otherV).

Vowel absence

When text is vowelled, 0652 can be used over a consonant to indicate that it is not followed by a vowel sound, however, like short vowel diacritics, it is only used when it is necessary to disambiguate pronunciation.

اسم

نستعلیق

Vowel sounds to characters

This section maps Modern Persian vowel sounds to common graphemes in the Arabic orthography. Persian follows Arabic in providing diacritics to express short vowel sounds, but also rarely uses them in normal text.

The columns run right to left and indicate typical word-initial, word-medial, and word-final usage. The joining forms shown are illustrative; alternative shapes may occur (see joining_forms). The examples show normal unvowelled usage as well as vowelled where a difference exists.

Click on a grapheme to find other mentions on this page (links appear at the bottom of the page). Click on the character name to see examples and for detailed descriptions of the character(s) shown.

Basic letters

و [U+0648 ARABIC LETTER WAW] and ی [U+06CC ARABIC LETTER FARSI YEH] represent both consonants and vowels. See mapToVowels.

Due to the influence of Arabic spelling in loan words, Persian has 2 letters for t, 3 letters for s, 4 letters for z, and 2 letters for h. The most common letter for s is س [U+0633 ARABIC LETTER SEEN], and for z is ز [U+0632 ARABIC LETTER ZAIN].

Glottal stop

In Persian, a glottal stop is commonly written using ع [U+0639 ARABIC LETTER AIN], eg. معنوی عربی شیعه

In other places, Persian uses a hamza (see hamza).

فائده

مؤثر

Hamza

The hamza (called hamze in Persian) is used to represent a glottal stop, however rather than being written as a single letter it is normally written as a combination of a diacritic and a base letter.

In most cases, that is the combination ـیٔـ [U+06CC ARABIC LETTER FARSI YEH + U+0654 ARABIC HAMZA ABOVE], eg. مسئول

However, if the glottal stop is preceded by the sound o, the combination is ـؤـ [U+0624 ARABIC LETTER WAW WITH HAMZA ABOVE], eg. مؤمن

Although it may not be pronounced, the hamza and its carrier also appears between vowels. For example, فائده زئوس مؤثر سؤال سوئیس

In the examples above you can see that the hamza+carrier provides a place to put a vowel diacritic for short vowels in vowelled text. Between two long vowels it represents a nominal glottal stop.

In the i sound of the indefinite ending, the hamza may also be used, or alternatively the ending may double the YEH after a long vowel, eg. compare: پایٔی پایی مویٔی مویی

On more rare occasions the hamza may appear over ا [U+0627 ARABIC LETTER ALEF]. This makes it clear that the alef represents a glottal stop, rather than a long vowel.

رأی

تأکید

It may also appear as an isolated form, ء [U+0621 ARABIC LETTER HAMZA], eg. علاءالدین امضاء

The hamza is also used over short, word-final vowels for ezafe.

A number of precomposed combinations of base letter and hamza are encoded in Unicode. Many of these decompose and recompose under normalisation as canonical alternatives, but a few do not and need to be treated with care. For information about which precomposed characters are used or not used here see hamza_choices.

Onsets

Consonant clusters in syllable onsets are simply written using a sequence of consonant letters.

Finals

No special mechanisms are used to write syllable or word final consonants.

Consonant clusters

Consonant clusters in Persian are simply written using a sequence of consonant letters. In vowelled text the consonant(s) without a following vowel may carry a sukun (see novowel).

Geminated consonants

In vowelled text, which is rare, geminated consonants are shown using the diacritic 0651 (called tašdid in Persian).

تپه

اولی

When both tašdid and zir are attached to the same base consonant, a common, though not universal, practice is to display the zir below the tašdid, rather than below the base consonant (see the examples just above). Some fonts, such as Amiri, don't do this. (See also context.)

Consonant sounds to characters

This section maps Persian consonant sounds to common graphemes in the Arabic orthography.

The right-hand column shows the various joining forms for each character.

Click on a grapheme to find other mentions on this page (links appear at the bottom of the page). Click on the character name to see examples and for detailed descriptions of the character(s) shown.

Formatting characters

Modern Arabic text makes use of a relatively large set of invisible formatting characters, especially in plain text, many of which are used to manage text direction. Descriptions of these characters can be found in the following sections:

• shapingcontrols
• directioncontrols

Hamza & precomposed characters

Unicode support for the various uses of the hamza is complicated.u,384 For notes on the usage of the hamza in Persian, see hamza and ezafe. In general, the Unicode Standard recommends to use 0654 in combination with a base character. However, there are a few exceptions to consider.

Confusables & spelling errors

The following lists some common errors found in Persian text due to the similarity of Unicode characters, or perhaps sometimes due to problems inputting the correct character. See also the items listed for combinations with hamza just above.

Although these characters look the same (at least in certain joining forms), they are all different characters, and should not be used interchangeably. If they are used, the ability to search and compare text is impaired unless the application is aware of and takes counter-measures against this substitution.

Percentages

Persian may use the Arabic percent sign, ٪ [U+066A ARABIC PERCENT SIGN].

The percent sign is typed and stored after the numbers. Like the numeric sequences using the ASCII hyphen (mentioned in expressions), it will appear to the left of a number if that number is preceded by Persian characters. However, if the digits of the percentage appear alone or at the beginning of a line it is necessary to use an ALM formatting character just before them to prevent the sign appearing on the right.

Observation: Wikipedia uses an ASCII percent sign with ASCII digits

Dates

TBD

Currency

The name of the currency is usually spelled out:

ریال

The Unicode Standard does have a symbol code point, FDFC, but it is only a compatibility character for use when converting from Iranian standards, and should not be used in normal Unicode textu,379.

Managing text direction

Unicode provides a set of 10 formatting characters that can be used to control the direction of text when displayed. These characters have no visual form in the rendered text, however text editing applications may have a way to show their location.

‫ [U+202B RIGHT-TO-LEFT EMBEDDING] (RLE), ‪ [U+202A LEFT-TO-RIGHT EMBEDDING] (LRE), and ‬ [U+202C POP DIRECTIONAL FORMATTING] (PDF) are in widespread use to set the base direction of a range of characters. RLE/LRE come at the start, and PDF at the end of a range of characters for which the base direction is to be set.

More recently, the Unicode Standard added a set of characters which do the same thing but also isolate the content from surrounding characters, in order to avoid spillover effects. They are ⁧ [U+2067 RIGHT-TO-LEFT ISOLATE] (RLI), ⁦ [U+2066 LEFT-TO-RIGHT ISOLATE] (LRI), and ⁩ [U+2069 POP DIRECTIONAL ISOLATE] (PDI). The Unicode Standard recommends that these be used instead.

There is also ⁨ [U+2068 FIRST STRONG ISOLATE] (FSI), used at the start of a range to set the base direction according to the first recognised strongly-directional character.

‏ [U+200F RIGHT-TO-LEFT MARK] (RLM) and ‎ [U+200E LEFT-TO-RIGHT MARK] (LRM) are invisible characters with strong directional properties that are also sometimes used to produce the correct ordering of text.

For more information about how to use these formatting characters see How to use Unicode controls for bidi text. Note, however, that when writing HTML you should generally use markup rather than these control codes. For information about that, see Creating HTML Pages in Arabic, Hebrew and Other Right-to-left Scripts.

Expressions & sequences

A sequence of numbers separated by hyphens (for example a range) runs from left to right in Persian (unlike Arabic language text).

fig_bidi_range shows some Persian text, which is right-to-left overall, containing a numeric range that is ordered LTR, ie. it starts with ۱۱۶۹ (1169) and ends with ۱۱۷۰ (1170).

Certain types of hyphen or other characters can affect the way expressions run, and you need to be aware of that when writing Persian text. For more details see the Expressions & sequences section in the description of the Arabic language orthography.

Writing styles

Persian may be written in a nasta'liq writing style. Key features include a sloping baseline for joined letters, and overall complex shaping and positioning for base letters and diacritics alike. There are also distinctive shapes for many glyphs and ligatures.

This is achieved in Unicode by applying the correct font – the underlying characters used are not different for nasta'liq vs. other styles.

Persian may also be written in several other styles, especially in artistic and historical writing.

Cursive script

Arabic script joins letters together. Fonts need to produce the appropriate joining form for a code point, according to its visual context. This results in four different shapes for most letters (including an isolated shape). The highlights in fig_cursive below show the same letter, ع [U+0639 ARABIC LETTER AIN], with two different joining forms. 

A few Arabic script letters only join on the right-hand side.

There are 2 Unicode blocks containing Arabic presentation forms: these contain individual characters corresponding to the various joining forms and ligatures. With only a handful of exceptions, characters in those blocks should not be used for text content; they are only for managing legacy encodings. Instead, characters in the main Arabic block should be used, and the font will manage the necessary cursive shaping.

Context-based shaping & positioning

Context-based shaping is everwhere in Persian due to the combination of the cursive behaviour of the script plus the strong tendency to arrange joined characters in cascades or vertical arrangements.

As in Arabic, lam followed by alef ligates, and there are other such commonly ligated forms.

لاغر

علاوه

Depending on the font, Arabic letters often have special rules for joining between certain characters, and diacritic marks generally vary in height and horizontal position depending on the size of the base character.

Another example of contextual positioning rules is the placement of ِ [U+0650 ARABIC KASRA] (zir) in vowelled text when it appears on the same letter as ّ [U+0651 ARABIC SHADDA] (tašdid). Usually, zir appears below the base letter, and this is how it can be distinguished from َ [U+064E ARABIC FATHA] (zebar). However, when combined, zir may be placed relative to the shadda diacritic, rather than relative to the base character, as seen in fig_kasra_placement.

Positioning of cursive joining forms is particularly complicated in the nastaliq style. See more details in the Urdu page.

Grapheme clusters

tbd

Word boundaries

Words are separated by spaces.

Phrase & section boundaries

Persian uses a mixture of ASCII and Arabic punctuation.

Bracketed text

Persian commonly uses ASCII parentheses to insert parenthetical information into text.

Mirrored characters

The words 'left' and 'right' in the Unicode names for parentheses, brackets, and other paired characters should be ignored. LEFT should be read as if it said START, and RIGHT as END. The direction in which the glyphs point will be automatically determined according to the base direction of the text.

The number of characters that are mirrored in this way is around 550, most of which are mathematical symbols. Some are single characters, rather than pairs. The following are some more common ones.

(␣)␣<␣>␣[␣]␣{␣}␣«␣»␣‹␣›

Quotations & citations

Persian uses guillemets around quotations, but the quotation marks typically have rounded glyph shapes, rather than sharp angles.

Line breaking & hyphenation

Basic line-break opportunities occur between the space-separated words.

They are not broken at the small gaps that appear where a character doesn't join on the left.

Text alignment & justification

See the section on justification for the Arabic language.

Text spacing

See the section on text spacing for the Arabic language.

Baselines, line height, etc.

The alphabetic baseline is a strong feature of Arabic script on the whole, since characters tend to join there. The nastaliq style of the script, on the other hand, uses arrangements of joined glyphs that cascade downwards from right to left, and ressemble a strongly sloping baseline.

Counters, lists, etc.

You can experiment with counter styles using the Counter styles converter. Patterns for using these styles in CSS can be found in Ready-made Counter Styles, and we use the names of those patterns here to refer to the various styles.

The Persian language uses 1 numeric and 2 fixed styles.

General page layout & progression

Persian books, magazines, etc., are bound on the right-hand side, and pages progress from right to left.

Columns are vertical but run right-to-left across the page.

Grids & tables

Tables, grids, and other 2-dimensional arrangements progress from right to left across a page.

Forms & user interaction

Form controls should display Persian text from right to left, starting at the right side of the input field. Form controls should also usually be arranged from right to left.

fig_form shows some form fields from an Arabic language web page. Note the position of the labels relative to the input fields and the checkbox, mirror-imaging a similar page in English. Note also that the input text in the first field appears to the right of the box.

The position of a scrollbar should depend on the user's environment, not on the content of a page. A non-Persian user viewing a web page in Persian shouldn't have to look for the scroll bar on the left side of the window. In a system that is set up for an Persian user, however, the scrollbar may appear on the left.