Dari

Dari is a dialect of Farsi, a Western Iranian language also known as Persian. Dari, also called Dari Persian or Afghan Persian, refers to all the variations of Farsi that are spoken in Afghanistan.

The Persian language belongs to the Info-Iranian branch of the Indo-European language. It originated in the Fars region of southwestern Iran around 400BC and is today the official language of Iran, Tajikistan and Afghanistan. The language has been influenced by Armenian, Georgian and the Turkic languages, as well as Arabic to a lesser extent. Dari is written in the Persian alphabet which evolved from Arabic script.

Dari is one of the two official languages of Afghanistan, with the other being Pashto. Most estimates on the number of native Dari speakers vary considerably from 25 to 50% of Afghanistan’s population. However, Dari has a large number of second language speakers and the language is used as a lingua franca across Afghanistan. It is estimated that 80% of the countries population understand the language.

In the United Kingdom Persian is spoken by 0.1% of the population, making it the 18th most spoken language in the country. As one of the most common forms of Persian, Dari Persian can be found spoken by significant communities across the United Kingdom. Dari is therefore an important language for communicating with communities and has become one of our most regularly requested languages. We can provide translations in and out of Dari as well as Dari interpreters.