Persian phonology

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

Vowels
/e/ is pronounced between the vowel of bate (for most English dialects) and the vowel of bet; /o/ is pronounced between the vowel of boat (for most English dialects) and the vowel of raw.

Word-final is rare except for  ('you' [singular] (compare tú in Spanish), loanwords (mostly of Arabic origin), and proper and common nouns of foreign origin, and word-final  is very rare in Iranian Persian, an exception being  ('no').  The word-final  in Early New Persian mostly shifted to  in contemporary Iranian Persian (often romanized as "eh", meaning  is also an allophone of  in word-final position in contemporary Iranian Persian), but is preserved in the Eastern dialects.

The chart to the right reflects the vowels of many educated Persian speakers from Tehran.

Diphthongs
Several diphthongs occur in Persian, including, //, , , , , and. //~// and //~// in Early New Persian become // and // respectively in modern Iranian Persian, but are retained in Eastern dialects. // becomes [] in colloquial Tehrani dialect but is preserved in other Western dialects and standard Iranian Persian.

Chart
In modern Persian alphabet, short vowels, , are usually not written, as is normally done in Arabic alphabet. (See Arabic phonology)

Historical shifts
Early New Persian had inherited from Middle Persian eight vowels: three short i, a, u and five long ī, ē, ā, ō, ū (in IPA: and ). It is likely that this system passed already in 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 the modern Persian varieties become the main distinction between the two sets of vowels.

The inherited eight-vowel inventory is retained without major upheaval in Afghan Persian (Dari), the only systematic innovation being the lowering of the lax close front i to a lax mid vowel.

In Iranian 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, similarly to Dari, the lax close vowels have become mid: i >, u >. The lax open vowel has become fronted: a >, and in word-final position further raised to.

Tajik has also lost two of the vowel contrasts, but differently from Iranian 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 become more front: or, a vowel usually romanized as ů. Open ā has become a mid, labial vowel.

Loanwords from Arabian generally abide to these shifts as well.

The following chart summarizes the later shifts into modern Tajik, Dari, and Iranian Persian.

Consonants
(Where symbols appear in pairs, the one to the right represents a voiced consonant. Allophones are in phonetic square brackets.)

Chart
Consonants can be geminated, often in words from Arabic. This is represented in the IPA either by doubling the consonant,, or with the length marker $⟨⟩$,.

Allophonic variants
Alveolar stops and  are either apico-alveolar or apico-dental. 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 (see below), so unlike in English, are aspirated even following, as in  ('I exist'). They are also aspirated at the end of syllables, although not as strongly.

The velar stops (viz. k, g) are palatalized before front vowels or at the end of a syllable.

In Classical Persian, غ and ق denoted the original Arabic phonemes, the voiced velar fricative and the voiceless uvular stop, respectively. In modern Tehrani Persian (which is used in the Iranian mass media, both colloquial and standard), there is no difference in the pronunciation of غ and ق, and they are both normally pronounced as a voiced uvular stop ; however, when they are positioned intervocalically and unstressed, lenition occurs and they tend to be pronounced more like a voiced velar fricative. This allophone is probably influenced by Turkic languages like Azeri and Turkmen. The classic pronunciations of غ and ق are preserved in the eastern variants of Persian (i.e. Dari and Tajiki), as well as in the southern dialects of the modern Iranian variety (e.g. Yazdi and Kermani dialects).

The alveolar flap has a trilled allophonic variant  at the beginning of a word, as in Spanish, Catalan, and other Romance languages in Spain (it can be a free variation between a trill  and a flap ); trill  as a separate phoneme occurs word-medially especially in loanwords of Arabic origin as a result of gemination of. Alveolar approximant [] also occurs as an allophone of before /l/, /s/, /ʃ/, /z/, and /ʒ/; [] sometimes becomes a free variation of  in these positions, such that فارسی is pronounced [] or []. [] sometimes becomes a free variation of in other positions, /r/ sometimes becomes [].

Velar nasal [ŋ] is an allophone of /n/ before [g], [k], [ɣ], [ɢ], and [x].

[f, k, s, ʃ, x] possibly become [v, g, z, ʒ, ɣ] respectively before voiced consonants; [n] possibly becomes [m] before bilabial consonants.

Dialectal variation
The pronunciation of و [w] in Classical Persian shifted to [v] in Iranian Persian, but is retained in Dari or Afghan Persian; but in Iranian Persian [v] allophonizes to [w] if preceded by consonant and followed by vowel in one whole syllable, as Persian has no syllable-initial consonant clusters (see below).

Syllable structure
Syllables may be structured as (C)(S)V(S)(C(C)).

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:
 * Onset
 * Consonant (C): Can be any consonant. (Onset is composed only of one consonant; consonant clusters are only found in loanwords, sometimes an epenthetic /æ/ is inserted between consonants.)
 * Nucleus
 * Semivowel (S)
 * Vowel (V)
 * Semivowel (S)
 * Coda
 * First consonant (C): Can be any consonant.
 * Second consonant (C): Can also be any consonant (mostly /d/, /k/, /s/, /t/, & /z/).

Stress
One syllable in each word (or breath group) is stressed, and knowing the rules is conducive to proper pronunciation.


 * 1) Stress falls on the last stem syllable of most words.
 * 2) Stress falls on the first syllable of interjections, conjunctions and vocatives. E.g.  ('yes'),  ('no, indeed'),  ('but'),  ('why'),  ('if'),  ('thanks'),  ('Ma'am'),  ('Sir'); cf. 4-4 below.
 * 3) Never stressed are:
 * 4) personal suffixes on verbs ( ('I do..'),  ('you do..'), ..,  ('they do..') (with one exception, cf. 4-1 below);
 * 5) a small set of very common noun enclitics:  the   ('of'),  a direct object marker,  ('a'),  ('and');
 * 6) the possessive and pronoun-object suffixes,, , , &c.
 * 7) Always stressed are:
 * 8) the personal suffixes on the positive future auxiliary verb (the single exception to 3-1 above);
 * 9) the negative verb prefix, , if present;
 * 10) if,  is not present, then the first non-negative verb prefix (e.g.  ('-ing'),  ('do!') or the prefix noun in compound verbs (e.g.  in );
 * 11) the last syllable of all other words, including the infinitive ending  and the participial ending,  in verbal derivatives, noun suffixes like  ('-ish') and , all plural suffixes , adjective comparative suffixes , and ordinal-number suffixes .  Nouns not in the vocative are stressed on the final syllable:  ('lady'),  ('gentleman'); cf. 2 above.
 * 12) In the informal language, the present perfect tense is pronounced like the simple past tense. Only the stress distinguishes between these tenses: the stressed personal suffix indicates the present perfect and the unstressed one the simple past tense:

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:
 * In the Tehrani accent and also most of the accents in Central and Southern Iran, the sequence in the colloquial language is nearly always pronounced .   The only common exceptions are high prestige words, such as  ('Qur'an'), and  ('Iran'), and foreign nouns (both common and proper), like the Spanish surname Beltran, which are pronounced as written.   A few words written as  are pronounced , especially forms of the verb  ('to come').
 * In the Tehrani accent, the unstressed direct object suffix marker is pronounced, or  after a consonant.
 * The stems of many verbs have a short colloquial form, especially ('he/she is'), which is colloquially shortened to  after a consonant or  after a vowel.
 * The 2nd and 3rd person plural verb subject suffixes, written and  respectively, are pronounced  and.
 * Many frequently-occurring verbs are shortened, such as ('I want') →, and  ('I go'_ →.