Dari

One of the other Middle Eastern languages – also referred to as Afghan Persian, Afghani Farsi or Eastern Farsi – is Dari, the official language of Afghanistan. Dari-English translation has gained momentum in the US, with so many US troops having been drafted to serve and then remaining in Afghanistan. Even before Afghanistan was hit by wars, many Afghans left the country, and the translation market for Dari started to flourish as the Afghan diaspora needed to be understood in its new communities in the US, UK, Australia and Canada. Immigrants forced to leave their homeland mainly due to ongoing conflicts needed their documents translated, and their host countries needed to communicate with them. Dari therefore has a particular significance in the translation industry, even if it might not be as linguistically significant as Persian (Farsi). Here are some quick facts that can give you a better idea about Dari.

Dari Quick Facts:

Estimated 9.6 million Speakers around the world mainly in Afghanistan. It is also spoken in Iran and Pakistan and neighboring regions.
Along with Pashto, it is one of the two official languages of Afghanistan
The modern Dari language has a great deal of Arabic and Persian loanwords for reasons of historical development. In recent decades, an increasing number of words have also been borrowed from other languages, including Turkish and English.
The syntax of Dari does not differ greatly from Farsi, but the stress accent is less prominent in Dari than in Farsi
The grammatical systems of Dari (Eastern Persian) and Farsi (Western Persian) do not differ in any significant way.. Both Dari and Farsi are inflected languages, i.e., they add suffixes to roots to express grammatical relations and to form words. Unlike many other Indo-Iranian languages, Dari and Farsi have lost most of their noun and verb inflections.
Dari has seven vowel phonemes. The vowels /e/ and /o/ have long counterparts. Vowel length makes a difference in word meaning. Dari has two diphthongs, /ai/ and /au/, which have no counterparts in Western Persian.
Word order
- The normal word order is Subject-Object-Verb. Modifiers follow the nouns they modify.
History of language dates back to 6th century A.D
People living close to the Iranian border in Afghanistan speak in Persian, while those living in northern Afghanistan speak the Shamaly dialect. The principal dialects spoken in Afghanistan are Herati Dari, Tajiki Dari, Kabuli Dari, Khorasani Dari, and Parsiwan. In Iran, the key dialects are Yazd Dari and Kerman Dari.
Other dialects are: Hazaragi, Mazari, Badakhshi, Panjshiri, Laghmani, Sistani, Aimaqi.
Formal Dari speech is closer to Standard Western Persian (Farsi) of Iran, while informal speech in some parts of Afghanistan is closer to Tajik of Tajikistan.
Written language is derived from Farsi or Arabic.
Dari literature is one of the richest in the world and composed of the body of writings in Modern Dari.
With the rise of Samanids and political revival of Khorasan, Dari emerged as a literary medium and became the established literary form of Dari language. During the period of Samanids a new era of literary began. The ancient tradition of Khorasan and Islam merged together. Dari was especially instrumental in freeing Islam from an exclusive Arabic attachment and universalized Islam thus helping to preserve it.
Classified as member of the Iranian branch of the Indo-Iranian family of languages a subfamily of the Indo-European languages and is technically considered the Afghan dialect of the Farsi or Persian language. And is sometimes referred to as “Eastern Persian”.
Almost 50% of the Afghan population speaks the Dari language.
Modern Dari began to develop by 9th century. It is a continuation of the Khorasanian standard language which had considerable Parthian and Middle Dari elements. It has much simpler grammar than its ancestral forms.

Approximately 30 percent of Afghanistan’s population, or about 5 million people, speak Dari.