Where Is Persian Spoken? Countries, Speakers and Dialects

Persian is spoken mainly in three countries, where it is an official language: Iran, where it is called فارسی (fârsi); Afghanistan, where it is officially called دری (dari); and Tajikistan, where it is called Tajik and written in the Cyrillic alphabet. Large communities also speak it in Uzbekistan, Pakistan, the Persian Gulf states and the diaspora, especially in North America and Europe.

Altogether, Persian has roughly 110 to 130 million speakers if you count people who use it as a second language, and somewhere around 70 to 80 million who grow up with it at home. Below you will find a country-by-country guide, a table you can use like a map, the main dialects, a short history of how Persian spread so far, and a few phrases to try with Persian speakers wherever you meet them.

Persian-speaking countries at a glance

Read this table from west to east, like a map. The speaker figures are rounded estimates: Iran and Afghanistan do not publish reliable census data on home languages, so every source gives slightly different numbers.

One language, three names: Farsi, Dari and Tajik are standard forms of the same Persian language, much as British, American and Australian English are standard forms of English. If you want the full comparison of vocabulary, sounds and scripts, read Farsi vs Persian vs Dari vs Tajik. This guide focuses on where each one lives.

Iran: where most Persian speakers live

Iran has by far the largest number of Persian speakers. Persian is the only official language in Iran’s constitution, which means it is the language of government, schools, universities, national television, newspapers and road signs. Children all over the country learn to read and write in Persian at school, even if they speak another language at home.

That second point matters. Iran is a multilingual country. Many Iranians grow up speaking Azerbaijani Turkish, Kurdish, Gilaki, Mazandarani, Luri, Balochi, Arabic or Turkmen at home, and Persian is the shared language they use with everyone else. So when people ask “what language is spoken in Iran?”, the honest answer is: Persian everywhere, plus many regional languages.

Iranians call their language فارسی (fârsi) Listen and their country ایران (irân) Listen. The variety most learners study is the standard Persian of Iran, and the everyday spoken form taught in most courses is based on the speech of Tehran.

Written Persian vs spoken Tehran Persian

In Iran, the written language and everyday speech are noticeably different. Books and news use the formal form; people talk to each other in a shortened colloquial form. Compare:

This gap between the written and spoken forms is one reason learners who meet Afghan or Tajik speakers are sometimes surprised: written Dari and Tajik stay closer to the formal language that Iranians write but rarely speak.

Afghanistan: Dari

In Afghanistan, Persian is officially called دری (dari) Listen, although many Afghans simply call it فارسی (fârsi) in daily life. The country’s 2004 constitution named Pashto and Dari as the two official languages. In practice, Dari has long been the common language between Afghanistan’s many ethnic groups and the main language of business in Kabul, Herat and the north.

Dari is spoken natively by Tajiks, Hazaras, Aimaqs and many urban Afghans, and as a second language by a large share of Pashto, Uzbek and Turkmen speakers. Well-known regional varieties include the speech of Kabul, Herati in the west (close to the Persian of eastern Iran) and Hazaragi in the central highlands.

Iranians and Afghans understand each other well, especially in conversation about everyday topics. The differences are mostly in accent and in a set of everyday words:

Both countries write with the same Persian alphabet, so a reader of Iranian Persian can read a Kabul newspaper without learning anything new.

Tajikistan: Tajik in Cyrillic letters

In Tajikistan, Persian is called Tajik, in Persian script تاجیکی (tâjiki) Listen, and in Tajik itself забони тоҷикӣ (zaboni tojikī, “the Tajik language”). It is the state language of Tajikistan, and Russian remains widely used in business, higher education and with Tajikistan’s neighbors.

The biggest difference is the alphabet. Under Soviet rule, Tajik moved from the Persian script to a Latin alphabet and then, around 1940, to Cyrillic, which it still uses. A Tajik and an Iranian can talk to each other with some effort, since the grammar and core vocabulary are shared, but they cannot read each other’s newspapers without learning the other script. Tajik also has more Russian and Uzbek loanwords, and its vowels sound different from Tehran Persian. A small example: “thank you” in Tajik is раҳмат (rahmat), a word from Arabic that you will also hear in other Central Asian languages.

Uzbekistan and Central Asia

Two of the most famous cities in Persian history, Samarkand (سمرقند, samarghand) and Bukhara (بخارا, bokhârâ), are now in Uzbekistan, and both still have large Tajik-speaking populations. Uzbekistan does not give Tajik official status, and estimates of how many people speak it there vary widely, from about one million to several million, partly because many people in these cities are bilingual in Tajik and Uzbek.

A Persian dialect called Bukhori was traditionally spoken by the Jews of Bukhara. Most Bukharan Jews have since emigrated, especially to Israel and the United States (Queens, New York, has a well-known community), and the dialect lives on there among older speakers.

Pakistan, India and the Persian Gulf

Pakistan. Persian is not an official language of Pakistan today, but it is spoken by the Hazara community in and around Quetta and by many of the Afghans who have lived in Pakistan as refugees since the 1980s. Persian was also the court language of the Mughal Empire, which is why Urdu, the national language of Pakistan, is full of Persian words and is written in a Persian-style script.

India. For centuries Persian was the language of government, literature and record-keeping in much of the Indian subcontinent, until the British replaced it with English and local languages in the 1830s. Today it is studied at Indian universities and used by small communities, but it is not a home language for many Indians. The poet Muhammad Iqbal, who was born in British India, wrote much of his poetry in Persian.

The Persian Gulf. Bahrain, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates (especially Dubai), Qatar and Oman have long-established communities of Iranian origin, some of whom have lived there for generations, plus newer Iranian residents. In parts of Dubai’s old trading districts you can still hear Persian in shops. Persian is not an official language in any Gulf state; the national language there is Arabic, which is a completely different language from Persian (see Farsi vs Arabic).

The Caucasus and Iraq: close relatives

A few languages are so close to Persian that people sometimes count them as Persian dialects. Tat is spoken in parts of Azerbaijan, and Judeo-Tat (Juhuri), spoken by the Mountain Jews of Azerbaijan and Dagestan in Russia, is closely related. Most linguists treat these as separate languages of the same southwestern Iranian family rather than as Persian itself. In Iraq, Persian is heard in the holy cities of Najaf and Karbala, which receive many Iranian pilgrims, but it is a visitors’ language there rather than a local one.

The Persian diaspora

Since the late 1970s, millions of Iranians, Afghans and Tajiks have settled abroad, and Persian is now a familiar language in many cities far from Iran. The largest communities are in:

• The United States, above all Southern California. Los Angeles has such a large Iranian community that it is nicknamed “Tehrangeles.” Estimates of Iranian Americans range from several hundred thousand to over a million, depending on how they are counted.
• Canada, especially Toronto and Vancouver.
• Germany, the United Kingdom, Sweden, the Netherlands and Austria, with both Iranian and Afghan communities. Germany has one of the largest Afghan communities in Europe.
• Turkey and the United Arab Emirates, which have many Iranian residents, students and businesspeople.
• Australia, with Iranian and Afghan communities in Sydney and Melbourne.
• Iran and Pakistan, which have hosted millions of Afghan refugees and migrants for decades.
• Russia, where many Tajik migrant workers live and work.

Many children in these communities understand spoken Persian but cannot read it. That is why so many of our readers are heritage learners who want to read and write the language their family speaks; the Persian alphabet guide is the best place for them to start.

Listen to the country names: افغانستان Listen تاجیکستان Listen. For more place names, see country names in Persian and language names in Persian.

How many people speak Persian?

There is no exact count, and you should be careful with any page that gives a precise figure. A reasonable summary:

• Native speakers: about 70 to 80 million, most of them in Iran, followed by Afghanistan and Tajikistan.
• Including second-language speakers: commonly estimated at about 110 to 130 million. Iran and Afghanistan both have many people who speak another language at home and Persian everywhere else.

The figures vary for three reasons: censuses in Iran and Afghanistan do not reliably record home language, many people are bilingual and could be counted either way, and some sources count Tajik and Dari separately while others count them as Persian.

Dialects and accents of Persian

Inside Iran you will hear distinct regional accents: Isfahani, with its famous sing-song melody; Shirazi, often described as soft and relaxed; Mashhadi in the northeast; Yazdi and Kermani in the center and southeast. All of them are Persian, and speakers of all of them understand the Tehran standard that dominates television.

It helps to separate three kinds of variety:

1. The three national standards: Iranian Persian (Farsi), Afghan Persian (Dari) and Tajik.
2. Regional dialects of Persian within those countries, such as Isfahani, Herati, Hazaragi or the dialects of northern Tajikistan.
3. Related but separate Iranian languages spoken in the same region, such as Kurdish, Gilaki, Mazandarani, Luri, Balochi and Pashto. Persian speakers do not automatically understand these; they are languages in their own right.

Why Persian is spoken across such a large area

Persian has a long recorded history, usually divided into three stages:

New Persian took shape in the eastern lands, in what is now northeastern Iran, Afghanistan and Central Asia, at courts such as that of the Samanids in Bukhara. From there it became the prestige language of a huge area for centuries: poets, scholars and officials used it from the Ottoman court in Anatolia to the Mughal court in Delhi. Rumi, whose family came from the Balkh region of today’s Afghanistan, wrote his poetry in Persian while living in Konya, in today’s Turkey. That long history is why Persian words turn up in Turkish, Urdu, Hindi, Uzbek and many other languages, and why a modern Iranian schoolchild can still read poetry written nearly a thousand years ago.

The modern borders came later. When Iran, Afghanistan and the Soviet republics of Central Asia took their present shape, each standardized “its” Persian separately, which is how one language ended up with three names and two alphabets.

New Persian added four letters to the Arabic alphabet for sounds Arabic does not have: پ (p), چ (ch), ژ (zh) and گ (g). You can practice typing them with the online Persian keyboard.

Phrases to use with Persian speakers anywhere

These work with Iranians, Afghans and (spoken aloud) with many Tajiks. The formal versions are safe with anyone; the spoken versions are what you will hear among friends in Iran.

If you are not sure how to greet someone first, start with hello in Persian; سلام (salâm) works in all three countries.

Which variety is best for a learner?

For most people, the answer is Iranian Persian. It has the most speakers, the most media and the most learning materials, and Afghan and Tajik speakers understand it. Once you know it, switching to Dari is mainly a matter of vocabulary and accent, and switching to Tajik is mainly a matter of learning a new alphabet. A structured course such as Learn Farsi in 100 Days teaches the Iranian standard, and you can begin for free with our Persian lessons for beginners. If you are wondering how long it will take, see is Persian hard to learn.

If the countries themselves interest you, the Iran quiz and our guide to Nowruz, the new year that Iranians, Afghans and Tajiks all celebrate, are good next steps.

Common questions

What countries speak Persian?

Persian is an official language in Iran (Farsi), Afghanistan (Dari) and Tajikistan (Tajik). It is also spoken by large communities in Uzbekistan, especially Samarkand and Bukhara, by Hazaras and Afghans in Pakistan, by Iranian-origin communities in the Persian Gulf states, and by diaspora communities in the United States, Canada, Europe, Turkey and Australia.

Is Persian the same as Farsi?

Yes. Farsi (فارسی) is the name of the language in Persian itself; “Persian” is its traditional English name. Dari and Tajik are the names used for the same language in Afghanistan and Tajikistan. For the details, see Farsi vs Persian vs Dari vs Tajik.

Is Persian spoken in India or Pakistan?

Not widely as a home language today. Persian was the official and literary language of much of the subcontinent for centuries, until the 1830s, and it left thousands of words in Urdu and Hindi. Today it is spoken in Pakistan mainly by the Hazara community and Afghans, and in India it is mostly studied rather than spoken at home.

Do they speak Persian in Arab countries?

Arabic, not Persian, is the national language of the Arab countries. Persian is spoken by Iranian-origin communities in Bahrain, Kuwait, the UAE, Qatar and Oman, and by pilgrims and visitors in Iraq. Persian and Arabic share an alphabet and many words, but they belong to different language families.

Can Iranians understand Afghans and Tajiks?

Iranians and Afghans understand each other well, with some different words and a different accent. Iranians and Tajiks can usually hold a conversation with some effort, but they cannot read each other’s writing without learning the other alphabet.

Is Persian spoken in Turkey?

Turkish is the language of Turkey, and it is not related to Persian. Turkey does have a sizable Iranian community, especially in Istanbul, and Ottoman Turkish borrowed many Persian words, but Persian is not a native language of Turkey.

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