Dari

Dari is a member of the Iranian branch of the Indo-European language family. Dari is the name given to classical Persian poetry and court language, as well as to Persian dialects spoken in Afghanistan.

The name is an abbreviation of the name Court Persian (Fārsi-yi Dari). Like Persian, It is spoken as a first language by 5.6 million people in Afghanistan. Various dialects of Dari are also spoken by some 15,000 people in Iran (including Zoroastrian Dari), and by 1 million people in Pakistan, as well as in emigré communities in the Middle East, Europe, Canada, and the U.S. The total number of Dari speakers around the world is estimated to be around 7.6 million (Ethnologue).

Old Persian and its descendant, Middle Persian, are thought to have originated in Parsa (or Fars), the center of the Persian Empire in southwest Iran. Old Persian is attested from the inscriptions left by the Achaemenid dynasty (559 to 331 B.C.) which ruled the territory that is now Iran until the conquest of Alexander the Great. Middle Persian, also known as Pahlavi, after the Parthians who ruled Persia after the collapse of Alexander's Empire, is attested by pre-Islamic Zoroastrian religious writings. There is no conclusive evidence that these languages are the ancestors of Modern Persian and Dari.

The bulk of the surviving Persian literature comes from the times following the Islamic conquest of Iran in the 7th-8th centuries AD when the Persians, who wrote in both Persian and Arabic, became the scribes and bureaucrats, as well as writers and poets of the Islamic empire. Persian poets such as Sādi, Hafez, Omar Khayyam and Rumi have left a significant mark on the literature of many countries.

Dialects
Dari has a number of dialects, most of which are mutually intelligible: Herati, Kabuli, Khorasani, and Parsiwan (Farsiwan), Yazd and Kerman.

Radio Afghanistan broadcasts are promoting a standardized pronunciation of the literary language based on classical norms. Formal Dari speech is closer to Standard Western Persian (Farsi), while informal speech in some parts of Afghanistan is closer to Tajik of Tajikistan.

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