Dari is one of the two official languages of
Afghanistan, along with
Pashto. Dari is a dialect of
Farsi also known as Persian. Dari is spoken in the northern and western parts of Afghanistan including the capital
Kabul in the east. About one-third of the population of Afghanistan, i.e., about 5,000,000 people (
Tajik,
Uzbek,
Turkmen,
Hazara, some
Pashtoon), speak Dari. It is the primary language of the Tadzhik, Hazara, and Chahar Aimak peoples. Dari serves as the means of communication between speakers of different languages in Afghanistan.
It is written in a modified Arabic alphabet, and it has many Arabic and Persian loanwords. The syntax of Dari does not differ greatly from Farsi, but the stress accent is less prominent in Dari than in Farsi. To mark attribution, Dari uses the suffix -ra. The vowel system of Dari differs from that of Farsi, and Dari also has additional consonants.