דארי

Dari (دری, "courtly") is the Eastern Persian variety spoken across Afghanistan as the country's lingua franca and one of two official languages alongside Pashto, with ~15M L1 speakers and an additional ~50% of the Afghan population using it as L2. Dari preserves classical Persian vowel distinctions ē/ī (مير mēr "village chief" vs. مير mīr) and ō/ū (شور šōr "salty" vs. شور šūr "tumult") that merged in Iranian Persian (fa). Vocabulary diverges through preserved older terms (پشک for "cat", where Iranian Persian uses گربه) and Pashto/Turkic loans. Mutually intelligible with Iranian Persian and Tajik (tg) at high register, but daily speech reveals clear regional identity. Written in the Perso-Arabic Nastaliq style (identical alphabet to Iranian Persian, distinct calligraphic preferences). Formal register vs. Tajik's Cyrillic-written Soviet-era variety preserves the classical Persian literary tradition.