Persian Alphabet Chart: 32 Letters, Sounds & Examples

32 letters. 114 forms. 17 shapes.

Every Persian alphabet chart opens the same way: there are 32 letters. That is true, and it is also the least useful number on this page.

The number that should worry you is 114. Persian letters have no capitals; instead each one changes shape depending on where it sits in a word — up to four forms apiece. Twenty-five letters take all four. Seven take only two. That is 114 shapes on the page in front of you, not 32.

The number that should reassure you is 17.

Look at ب پ ت ث. That is one skeleton — a shallow bowl with a tail — wearing four different sets of dots. One below, two below, two above, three above. The underlying stroke is identical, and so is every one of its four positional forms. Learn to draw that bowl once and you can write all four letters, in all four positions.

The same trick runs through most of the alphabet. ج چ ح خ are one skeleton. د ذ are one. So are ر ز ژ, س ش, ص ض, ط ظ, ع غ, ف ق, and ک گ. Ten families cover twenty-five letters. Only seven letters — آ (ا), ل, م, ن, و, ه, ی — have a shape belonging to nothing else.

Ten families plus seven one-offs is seventeen skeletons. Run the same arithmetic on those and 114 forms collapses to 60. Learn seventeen shapes and a single rule about connection, and the chart below stops being a memorisation problem.

That rule is next, because a chart you can read is worth ten charts you can only stare at.

The rule that decides how words look

Persian is written right to left, and it is cursive: letters join to their neighbours inside a word, the way English cursive does. Each letter can take up to four positional forms:

• Isolated — attached to nothing.
• Initial — attached to the letter after it, but not before.
• Medial — attached on both sides.
• Final — attached to the letter before it, but not after.

Take ب through all four and you can see the skeleton surviving intact: بله (bale, yes) has it initial; کبوتر (kabutar, pigeon) has it medial; سیب (sib, apple) has it final; and on its own it is simply ب.

Here is where the families pay off a second time. Letters in one family share identical positional forms. Work out how ب behaves in the middle of a word and you have simultaneously solved پ, ت and ث — four letters, one lesson. The saving is actually larger than the count of seventeen suggests. In شبنم (shabnam, dew), the ـبـ and the ـنـ are the same single tooth, distinguished only by whether the dot sits below or above; ی behaves the same way. Their isolated and final forms diverge, which is why they are counted separately here, but through the middle of a word they are one shape. That is why our Decoded course teaches them together as the B Nāzanin family.

Then comes the exception, and it is a small, closed, learnable one. Seven letters refuse to join forwards. They accept a connection from the letter before them but will not pass it on to the letter after:

آ (ا) · د · ذ · ر · ز · ژ · و

These are the disjoining letters, and they are why a Persian word can appear to have gaps inside it. ندارد (nadārad, does not have) looks broken because د will not connect forwards — that gap is not a space between words, it is the script obeying the rule. For these seven, isolated and initial forms are identical, and so are medial and final. Two shapes each instead of four.

That is the whole system: seventeen skeletons, four positions, seven letters that break the chain. Now the chart is readable.

The Persian alphabet chart

All 32 letters in alphabetical order, with the letter name, transliteration in the Iranian Studies Transliteration System (ISTS) used by Cambridge’s Iranian Studies, IPA, an English pronunciation guide, native audio, and an example word.

You will also meet همزه (Hamze), written ئ and transliterated ʾ. It is not counted among the 32 core letters, but it belongs here for orthographic completeness: it marks a glottal stop — the same sound as ع, and you can hear it here.

Every audio file above is a native recording from our free Persian alphabet lesson, where you can also hear the six vowels and test yourself on them.

Two things this chart cannot show you

Read down the Name & Sound and you will notice something a chart of this kind usually hides. The letter-to-sound relationship in Persian is not one-to-one, and it breaks in two opposite directions. These are the two facts that separate people who have memorised a chart from people who can actually read.

Sound duplicates: several letters, one sound

Four different letters spell the sound /z/. Three spell /s/. The chart above gives them away — ث, س and ص all point to the same audio file, because they are the same sound.

• /s/ — ث · س · ص
• /z/ — ذ · ز · ض · ظ
• /t/ — ت · ط
• /h/ — ح · ه
• /gh/ — ق · غ

That last pair catches people out, because the two letters are transliterated differently — ق as q, غ as gh — which suggests a distinction your ear should be able to catch. It cannot. In modern Iranian Persian, ق and غ are pronounced identically. The transliteration preserves the spelling difference, not a sound difference.

These letters mostly arrived with Arabic loanwords, which kept distinctions Persian does not make. The practical consequence is one you should hear now rather than discover later: hearing a Persian word does not tell you how to spell it. If someone says sedā, you cannot know from the sound alone whether it starts with ث, س or ص. Spelling in Persian is learned word by word, exactly as with English through, threw and thru.

Multitasking letters: one letter, several sounds

The reverse is also true. Three letters are read differently depending on the word:

• و — /ow/ in دولت · /o/ in دو · /u/ in روز · /v/ in وام
• ه — /e/ in خانه · /h/ in هوا
• ی — /ey/ in نِی · /i/ in میز · /y/ in یک

This is where a chart alone stops being enough, and it connects to something structural about the writing system: Persian is an abjad, a script that records consonants and leaves most short vowels unwritten. پدر is written ⟨pdr⟩ and read pedar. The vowels are supplied by the reader, from knowledge of the word.

That sounds alarming. In practice it is why Persian spelling has stayed stable for over a thousand years across dialects that pronounce vowels quite differently — کردن is written identically whether a speaker says kardan or kerdan. But it does mean that reading Persian is not decoding letter by letter. It is recognising words.

Where to go from the chart

A chart shows you the letters. It cannot show you a letter behaving differently in the middle of a word, or teach your hand the stroke order, or give you the repetitions that turn recognition into reading. If you are still weighing whether the alphabet is worth the effort at all, we’ve made that case in full — the short version is that transliteration quietly caps how far you can go.

The Persian Alphabet, Decoded is built for exactly that gap. The letters arrive in five staged groups that follow the shape families above — the disjoining seven first, because they are the easiest win, then the joining families one at a time. Around 22 hours of active study, 120+ guides and interactive exercises, and 160+ interactive flashcards, with native audio for every letter and word, animated stroke-by-stroke handwriting guides, a printable worksheet in every lesson, and a fully decodable path: you will never meet a practice word containing a letter you haven’t been taught. Most learners finish in about 1.5–2 months at one lesson a week, with a full year of access and a 14-day guarantee. A launch discount is currently active.

If you would rather meet the letters inside poetry than inside drills, Listen to the Reed teaches the same alphabet through 12 live-recorded sessions with Dr. Leila — around 12 hours of video built around the 18 verses of the Neynameh, the opening of Rumi’s Masnavi — with word-by-word analysis, 100+ interactive exercises and 166 visual flashcards. It is free with the code RUMIDAF1 through 30 September 2026, thanks to the DhunAnand Foundation.

Either route leads to the same next rung: Let’s Learn Persian! (A1), where the letters you now recognise start becoming sentences you can say.

Curious how long the alphabet stage actually takes? We’ve broken the numbers down in how long it takes to learn the Persian alphabet. And if you plan to write by hand as well as read — which we’d recommend — handwriting and the Persian alphabet explains why. More in the series is collected on our Persian alphabet resources page.

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