- ISO 639
fa- Its own name
- فارسی
- Script
- Arabic
- Direction
- Right to left
Persian
Persian (فارسی) is spoken by 89.2M people across 9 territories in CLDR, and is official nationally in 2 of them. Iran holds 74% of its speakers. One translation covers all of it, which is why localization is planned by language and launched by market.
At a glance
What one translation into Persian buys, before anyone argues about which market to enter first.
Speakers
89.2M
Iran 74% · Afghanistan 22% · Pakistan 2%
First and second language speakers, summed across the 9 territories CLDR records. The bar splits them by territory, largest first.
Online speakers
61.8M
0%100%
69% of speakers, once each territory's speaker count is scaled by its World Bank internet rate. Territories with no internet figure contribute nothing, so this is a floor.
Concentration
74%
0%100%
The largest single territory, Iran, holds 74% of speakers. Spread out enough that regional wording and currency will come up.
Territories
9
2 where it is official nationally, 2 where at least one person in five speaks it. The rest are diaspora and minority populations, which CLDR does record.
Reachable GDP
$6.9T
Combined GDP of every territory where the language appears at all. An upper bound on the market, not a revenue forecast: it counts the whole economy, not the speakers' share of it.
Translation rate
1.00×
1.0×1.6×+
Prices at the mainstream per-word rate used across this site's estimators.
Where Persian is spoken
Every territory CLDR records, largest speaker count first. Share is of that territory's own population, so the column does not add up to anything.
| Territory | Share of that market | Speakers | Online | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| IranIR | 75% | 66.3M | 56.6M | official |
| AfghanistanAF | 50% | 20.1M | 3.2M | official |
| PakistanPK | 0.66% | 1.7M | 953.6K | minority or diaspora |
| IraqIQ | 0.87% | 366.1K | 298.3K | minority or diaspora |
| QatarQA | 11% | 280.7K | 275.4K | minority or diaspora |
| CanadaCA | 0.61% | 236.6K | 223.3K | minority or diaspora |
| United Arab EmiratesAE | 2% | 190.6K | 190.6K | minority or diaspora |
| TajikistanTJ | 0.78% | 81.1K | 45.2K | minority or diaspora |
| OmanOM | 0.94% | 36.7K | 34.9K | minority or diaspora |
The long tail matters. CLDR does record diaspora populations, so a language usually appears in more territories than its home markets, at small shares. Those rows rarely justify a launch on their own. They are why a language's total reach is larger than any one country page shows. A dash in the online column means the territory has no World Bank internet figure, and it does not mean zero.
What it takes to ship
The work that is not translation: the writing system, the grammar your message format has to survive, and what the words cost.
Writing system
Arabic
Lays out right to left, so the interface mirrors as well as translates. Bundle a webfont: platform defaults do not reliably cover this script.
Plural categories
2
Every counted message needs up to 2 arms, and the translator has to be given all of them.
Rate index
1.00×
Prices at the mainstream per-word rate.