Persian (Farsi) vs Arabic: The Differences

Persian belongs to the Indo-European family, in the Iranian branch, so its relatives include Kurdish, Pashto and, much further back, English, Spanish and Hindi. Arabic belongs to the Afro-Asiatic family, in the Semitic branch, alongside Hebrew, Aramaic and Amharic. The two families split from a common ancestor so long ago that no one can show a link.

You can see the Indo-European connection in everyday Persian if you look for it. The words for mother, father, brother and daughter are Madar, Pedar, Baradar and Dokhtar, and they come from the same old roots as the English words. Do and Se are the cousins of two and three, and Dah is a cousin of ten. Arabic has no such cousins in English.

Persian is written in the Arabic script, with four extra letters for the sounds p, ch, zh and g. That is the most visible reason the two languages are mixed up, because a page of either one looks like a flowing line of connected letters, written right to left.

The script came with history. After the Arab conquest of Persia in the seventh century, Persian speakers adopted the Arabic alphabet and wrote their own language with it. A new Persian literature grew in that script, and poets such as Rumi, Hafez and Saadi wrote in it for a thousand years. Sharing a script is a fact about writing. It says nothing about the grammar or the sound.

Centuries of contact left a large share of Arabic vocabulary inside Persian, especially in formal, scientific, religious and abstract language. Everyday words came too, and many of them are in your first lessons. Salam, Ketab for book, Aziz for dear, Ghahve for coffee and Gheymat for price all arrived from Arabic, and Persian speakers use them as fully Persian words.

The traffic ran the other way as well, in smaller numbers. Arabic and its dialects took Persian words such as the one for the market, Bazar, and Persian also supplied words to Turkish, Urdu and many other languages. When a Persian speaker hears an Arabic word, they often know it. When they hear Arabic sentences, they usually do not understand them.

Grammar is where the difference is greatest. Arabic builds words from roots of three consonants, so the same three letters yield a whole family of related words. It has grammatical gender for nouns and verbs, a definite article and a dual number. Persian has no grammatical gender at all, and the one word Oon means both he and she. It has no definite article, and its verbs follow regular patterns with a prefix and a personal ending.

The sounds differ too. Arabic has deep throat sounds that Persian does not use, and Persian has the sounds p, ch and g that standard Arabic lacks. Persian speakers pronounce Arabic loanwords the Persian way, which is why an Arabic word can sound different on either side of the border.

One more thing. Iran is not an Arab country, and Iranians are not Arabs. Persian is the language of Iran, Afghanistan, where it is called Dari, and Tajikistan, where it is called Tajik. Arabic is spoken across the Arab world. Mixing the two up is a common mistake, and a good one to avoid with a Persian speaker.

For an English speaker starting to speak, Persian is the gentler of the two. It has no gender, no definite article, no case endings and regular verbs, and its sounds are closer to the ones English already makes. The script is the same hurdle in both, and that is exactly why Finglish writes Persian in English letters so you can speak first and read later.

Arabic asks for more at the start. Beyond the deeper sounds and the root system, written Arabic and the spoken dialects differ a great deal, so a learner often has to pick which Arabic to learn. Spoken Persian is closer to the written one, and the version most widely understood is the casual Tehrani Persian that Finglish teaches.