Persian alphabet

The Persian alphabet (Persian: الفبای فارسی‎‎ alefbā-ye fārsi) or Perso-Arabic script is a writing system based on the Arabic script and used for the Persian language. It has four letters more than Arabic: پ [p], چ [t͡ʃ], ژ [ʒ], and گ [ɡ].

The Perso-Arabic script is an abjad and is exclusively written cursively. That is, the majority of the letters in a word connect to each other. This is also implemented on computers. Whenever the Perso-Arabic script is typed, the computer auto-connects the letters to each other. Unconnected letters are not widely accepted. In Perso-Arabic, as with Arabic, words are written from right to left.

A characteristic feature of this script, possibly tracing back to Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, is that vowels are underrepresented. For example, in Classical Arabic, of the six vowels, the three short ones are normally entirely omitted (although certain diacritics are added to indicate them in special circumstances, notably in the Qur'an), while the three long ones are represented ambiguously by certain consonants.