Persian phonology


The Persian language has between six and eight vowel phonemes and twenty-six consonant phonemes. It features contrastive stress and syllable-final consonant clusters.

Vowels

The chart to the right reflects the vowels of many educated Persian speakers from Tehran.
The three vowels, and are traditionally referred to as 'short' vowels and the other three as 'long' vowels. In fact the three 'short' vowels are short only when in an open syllable that is non-final, e.g. صدا 'sound', 'God'. In a closed syllable that is unstressed, they are around sixty percent as long as a long vowel; this is true for the 'long' vowel as well. Otherwise the 'short' and 'long' vowels are all pronounced long. Example: 'firmer'.
When the short vowels are in open syllables, they are also unstable and tend in informal styles to assimilate in quality to the following long vowel, sometimes in formal situations also. Thus دویست 'two hundred' becomes, شلوغ 'crowded' becomes, رسیدن 'to arrive' becomes and so on.
Word-final is rare except for تو and nouns of foreign origin, and word-final is very rare in Iranian Persian, an exception being نه . The word-final in Early New Persian mostly shifted to in contemporary Iranian Persian, but is preserved in the Eastern dialects. The short vowel is the most common short vowel that is pronounced in final open syllables.

Diphthongs

The status of diphthongs in Persian is disputed. Some authors list, others list only and, but some do not recognize diphthongs in Persian at all. A major factor that complicates the matter is the change of two classical and pre-classical Persian diphthongs: and. This shift occurred in Iran but not in some modern varieties. Morphological analysis also supports the view that the alleged Persian diphthongs are combinations of the vowels with and.
The Persian orthography does not distinguish between the diphthongs and the consonants and ; that is, they both are written with ی and و respectively.
becomes in the colloquial Tehran dialect but is preserved in other Western dialects and standard Iranian Persian.

Spelling and example words

For Western Persian:
Phoneme LetterRomanizationExample
ـَ,ـَه;a نه "no"
ـَا, آ,ىٰ;ā تا "until"
ـِ,ـِه;e که "that"
ـِیـ,ـِی;ī شیر "milk"
ـُ,ـُو;o تو "you"
ـُو;ū زود "early"

Phoneme LetterRomanizationExample
ـَیْ;ey کی "when?"
ـَوْ;ow نو "new"

The variety of Afghanistan has also preserved these two Classic Persian vowels:
Phoneme LetterRomanizationExample
ـی;ē شیر "lion"
ـو;ō زور "strength"

In the modern Persian alphabet, the short vowels,, are usually left unwritten, as is normally done in the Arabic alphabet.

Historical shifts

Early New Persian inherited from Middle Persian eight vowels: three short i, a, u and five long ī, ē, ā, ō, ū. It is likely that this system passed into the common Persian era from a purely quantitative system into one where the short vowels differed from their long counterparts also in quality: i > ; u > ; ā >. These quality contrasts have in modern Persian varieties become the main distinction between the two sets of vowels.
The inherited eight-vowel inventory is retained without major upheaval in Dari, which also preserves quantitative distinctions.
In Western Persian, two of the vowel contrasts have been lost: those between the tense mid and close vowels. Thus ē, ī have merged as, while ō, ū have merged as. In addition, the lax close vowels have been lowered: i >, u > ; this vowel change also happened in Dari. The lax open vowel has become fronted: a >, and in word-final position further raised to. Modern Iranian Persian does not feature distinctive vowel length.
In both varieties ā is more or less labialized, as well as raised in Dari. Dari ō is also somewhat fronted.
Tajiki has also lost two of the vowel contrasts, but differently from Western Persian: here the tense/lax contrast among the close vowels has been eliminated. That is, i, ī have merged as, and u, ū have merged as. The other tense back vowels have shifted as well. Mid ō has shifted front: or, a vowel usually romanized as ů. Open ā has been labialized and raised to an open-mid vowel.
Loanwords from Arabic generally undergo these changes as well.
The following chart summarizes the later shifts into modern Tajik, Dari, and Western Persian.

Consonants

Notes:
Alveolar stops and are either apical alveolar or laminal denti-alveolar. The voiceless obstruents are aspirated much like their English counterparts: they become aspirated when they begin a syllable, though aspiration is not contrastive. The Persian language does not have syllable-initial consonant clusters, so unlike in English, are aspirated even following, as in هستم . They are also aspirated at the end of syllables, although not as strongly.
The velar stops are palatalized before front vowels or at the end of a syllable.
In Classical Persian, the uvular consonants غ and ق denoted the original Arabic phonemes, the fricative and the plosive, respectively. In modern Tehrani Persian, there is no difference in the pronunciation of غ and ق. The actual realisation is usually that of a voiced stop, but a voiced fricative ~ is common intervocalically. The classic pronunciations of غ and ق are preserved in the eastern varieties, Dari and Tajiki, as well as in the southern varieties.
Some Iranian speakers show a similar merger of ج and ژ, such that alternates with, with the latter being restricted to intervocalic position.
Some speakers front to a voiceless palatal fricative in the vicinity of, especially in syllable-final position. The velar/uvular fricatives are never fronted in such a way.
The is more heavily trilled at the beginning of a word than in the middle or at the end; a geminate trill occurs word-medially, especially in loanwords of Arabic origin. An approximant also occurs as an allophone of before ; is sometimes in free variation with in these and other positions, such that فارسی is pronounced or and سقرلات or. is sometimes realized as a long approximant.
The velar nasal is an allophone of before, and the uvular nasal before.
may be voiced to, respectively, before voiced consonants; may be bilabial before bilabial consonants. Also may in some cases change into, or even ; for example باز may be pronounced as well as or and/or, colloquially.

Dialectal variation

The pronunciation of و in Classical Persian shifted to in Iranian Persian and Tajik, but is retained in Dari. In modern Persian may be lost if preceded by a consonant and followed by a vowel in one whole syllable, e.g. خواب 'sleep', as Persian has no syllable-initial consonant clusters.

Spelling and example words

In standard Iranian Persian, the consonants and are pronounced identically.
Consonants, including and, can be geminated, often in words from Arabic. This is represented in the IPA either by doubling the consonant, سیّد саййид, or with the length marker,.

Phonotactics

Syllable structure

may be structured as V.
Persian syllable structure consists of an optional syllable onset, consisting of one consonant; an obligatory syllable nucleus, consisting of a vowel optionally preceded by and/or followed by a semivowel; and an optional syllable coda, consisting of one or two consonants. The following restrictions apply:
The Persian word-accent has been described as a stress accent by some, and as a pitch accent by others. In fact the accented syllables in Persian are generally pronounced with a raised pitch as well as stress; but in certain contexts words may become deaccented and lose their high pitch.
From an intonational point of view, Persian words usually have the intonation H*, e.g. کتاب 'book'; unless there is a suffix, in which case the intonation is H* + L, e.g. کتابم 'my book'. The last accent of a sentence is usually accompanied by a low boundary tone, which produces a falling pitch on the last accented syllable, e.g. کتاب بود 'it was a book'.
When two words are joined in an اضافه ezafe construction, they can either be pronounced accentually as two separate words, e.g. مردم اینجا 'the people here', or else the first word loses its high tone and the two words are pronounced as a single accentual phrase:. Words also become deaccented following a focused word; for example, in the sentence نامه‌ی مامانم بود رو میز 'it was my mom's letter on the table' all the syllables following the word مامان 'mom' are pronounced with a low pitch.
Knowing the rules for the correct placement of the accent is essential for proper pronunciation.
  1. Accent is heard on the last stem-syllable of most words.
  2. Accent is heard on the first syllable of interjections, conjunctions and vocatives. E.g. بله , نخیر , ولی , چرا , اگر , مرسی , خانم , آقا ; cf. 4-4 below.
  3. Never accented are:
  4. # personal suffixes on verbs, ,.., ;
  5. # the possessive and pronoun-object suffixes,,,, &c.
  6. # a small set of very common noun enclitics: the اضافه , a definite direct object marker, , ;
  7. Always accented are:
  8. # the personal suffixes on the positive future auxiliary verb ;
  9. # the negative verb prefix, ;
  10. # if, is not present, then the first non-negative verb prefix, or the prefix noun in compound verbs ;
  11. # the last syllable of all other words, including the infinitive ending and the participial ending, in verbal derivatives, noun suffixes like and, all plural suffixes, adjective comparative suffixes, and ordinal-number suffixes. Nouns not in the vocative are stressed on the final syllable: خانم , آقا ; cf. 2 above.
  12. In the informal language, the present perfect tense is pronounced like the simple past tense. Only the word-accent distinguishes between these tenses: the accented personal suffix indicates the present perfect and the unstressed one the simple past tense :
FormalInformalMeaning
دیده ام'I have seen'
دیدم'I saw'

Colloquial Iranian Persian

When spoken formally, Iranian Persian is pronounced as written. But colloquial pronunciation as used by all classes makes a number of very common substitutions. Note that Iranians can interchange colloquial and formal sociolects in conversational speech. They include: