Iranian Persian Formatting

Numeric, monetary, date, time, affirmative & negatives, character sets, personal names, keyboard layouts

1 Numeric Formatting

1.1. How do you write the number 90,876,543.21 in the Persian language?

The decimal separator (U+066B) is like a forward slash, but almost two-thirds the size and moved half
its height lower.
The thousands separator (U+066C) is apostrophe-like or tick-like, but may take different shapes based on the style of the writer or font.
The shapes of digits 4, 5, and 6 is different from the usual Arabic shapes, as can be seen above.
The digits may only be grouped in groups of three.

1.2. How do you write the percentage 22.5% in the Persian language?

The percent sign should appear on the left.
There should be no space.
The Persian percent sign is a little different from the European percent sign; it uses Persian zeros
instead of European zeros.

1.3.

1.4. Numbers spelled out in Persian. (Afghan usage given where differs from Iranian.)

.

یک میلیارد

1.5. How do you spell the number 123.45  (one hundred and twenty-three point four five?)   

 صد و بیست و سه ممیز چهل و پنج

1.6. How do you spell the negative number -56,789 (minus fifty-six thousand seven hundred and eighty-nine) ?

2 Monetary Formatting

2.1 Iran: Rial

a. The Rial sign was common in Persian texts in the 1980s when typewriters were still used, but is now used with less and less frequency.
b. Its usage is not recommend.
c. The character was invented in early 1970s by the technical committee of Iranian national
standard ISIRI 820:1973, Character Arrangement on Keyboards of Persian Typewriters.

2.1a Afghanistan: Afghani - افغانی

a. The unit of currency in Afghanistan is the  Afghani

2.2 Rial Subdivisions

There was once a subdivision of Rial called the Dinar, equal to 0.01 of a Rial, but it was abandoned in about 1985.  Nowadays, no subdivisions of the Rial are used in accounting, and the non-integral amounts are rounded to whole Rials.

2.3. How do you represent the amount 12,345,678 Rials in the Persian language?

Thousands separators should be used between the digits, in groups of three (just like normal
numbers). There should be a space between the amount and the currency sign.
The currency sign should appear at the left.

2.4. For accounting purposes, how do you represent negative Rial amounts in the Persian language? How do you write the negative amount 1,234 Rials?

3 Date and Time Conventions

3.1. The names of the days of the week in the Persian language.

English

Persian

Abbreviation (in use but not official)

3.2 Saturday is considered the first day of the week.

3.3. The names of Persian month names in the Persian language.  (You can listen to the month names as pronounced in two cities in Afghanistan.)

Iran

Afghanistan

Dialect of Kabul

Dialect of Herat 

Esfand

3.4. The Persian date 30 Shahrivar 1361

3.5. The names of the Gregorian months in the Persian language. (Listen to the month names as pronounced in two cities in Afghanistan.)

Iran

Afghanistan

Dialect of Kabul 

Dialect of Herat 

3.6. The Gregorian date 1982-09-21 (21 September 1982)

3.8. Abbreviations for the negative or positive dates-Gregorian.

3.10.  24 vs. 12-hour clock

The 12-hour clock is more common among people. But to avoid ambiguity, the official usage is the 24-hour system.

3.11. There are no abbreviations or short names for a.m. and p.m.

However, the time of day is often said after the time, for example:

دهِ قبل از ظهر

دوی بعد از ظهر

Bamdad or Sobh

Qabl az Zohr

Zohr

Ba`d az Zohr

Asr or  Sham

Shab

3.12. The times of day in the format common in Iran.

Written without leading zero is preferred:

3.13. The full date and time "Tuesday, 30 Shahrivar 1361, 09:07:04"  in the Persian language.

3.14. The full date and time "Tuesday, 21 September 1982, 09:07:04" in the Persian language.

3.15. The phrase "Iran Time" or "Iran Standard Time" or in the Persian language.

3.16. The phrase "Greenwich Mean Time"  (GMT) in the Persian language.

4 Affirmative and Negative Answers

4.1. The words for "Yes" and "No" in the Persian language.

5 Character Set Considerations

5.1. Character sets being used for representation of the Persian language on computers.

Historically, the most widely used character sets used for Persian information interchange
were "Iran System" (named after the inventor company), "Sina" (named after the inventor
company, SinaSoft), and various modified versions of Windows codepage CP1256. There
have also been many vendor-specific character sets, and sometimes even different character
sets for different products of a single vendor. Worth mentioning are MacFarsi character
set (by Apple) and three different character sets used in Persian localizations of TEX. There
were also two national Iranian standards for information interchange, ISIRI 2900:1989 and
ISIRI 3342:1993, but neither has been used widely. Recently, almost every vendor has been
moving to Unicode, and thousands of Persian web pages exist in UTF-8 Unicode encoding. But
the majority of Persian digital texts are still encoded in various non-standard modifications of
CP1256.

6 Use of Special Characters

6.1. Persian quotation marks-  the word "Iran" in quotation marks in the Persian language:

The guillemets may either be round or sharp depending on the font, but usually the round ones are preferred.

6.2. Punctuation marks used in the Farsi language along with their names and use.

The European punctuation marks full stop (period), colon, exclamation mark, en dash, em dash,
solidus (forward slash), parentheses, and square brackets have the same usage as in the
English language. The Persian inter-word hyphen appears a little lower than the English
hyphen, to go with the height of the flat letters of Persian. There are also three punctuation
marks that are mirrored or rotated shapes of English punctuation marks which
are also used in the same way as their English counter-parts:

6.3.  Koranic annotation marks used in Korans published in Iran.

Currently, Korans published in Iran use the same annotation marks as those in Saudi Arabia.
There were various classes of annotation marks used until the 1980s, but they have all
disappeared recently. There is some research undergoing by Iranian Center for Publication
of Koran to invent new symbols better suited for Iranian readers.

8 Personal Names Rules

8.1. How does one address men and women in the Persian language?

8.2. Given name vs. family name.

Persian speakers living in Iran usually have a first name given to them at birth, and a family
name which is inherited from their father or mother. Sometimes the first name or the family
name has multiple parts, but these are clearly distinguished as parts of the first name or the
last name. A very long name may be (the family name is underlined):

which can be transliterated as "Seyyed Behdad-e Esfahbod-e Mir-Hosayn-zade-ye Sarabi"

9 Coding of National Entities

9.8. Government-approved or authoritative reference (such as a national standard) specifying a standard orthography for the Persian language.

10 Keyboard Layout

The most common keyboard layouts are the Microsoft Farsi layout and SinaSoft's
Zarnegar layout, both based on ISIRI 2901:1988 (which was based on two character-
per-letter technologies of 1980s). The newer version of that standard,
based on modern one-character-per-letter character sets, was published in 1994
and is much superior to that. The ISIRI 2901:1994 layout follows:

10.2. Concerns about special letters, symbols, or characters that should be on a Persian keyboard layout but usually are not.

The combining Hamza (U+0654) and the Superscript Alef (U+0670) are not on the
ISIRI 2901:1994 layout which creates some problems entering Persian texts. Microsoft Farsi
layout has many more missing characters, most notably the Pseudo-space (U+200C) and
Persian decimal separator (U+066B) and thousands separator (U+066C)

Also thanks to Everson Typography and their work on Afghanistan locale requirements

 http://www.afg-info.com/ who emailed to ask why I'd forgotten about Afghan Persian and subsequently has been sending me a steady stream of enlightening Afghan data. In addition, Farzan put me in touch with the most kind and generous Ali Asghar Daliry who went to a lot of trouble to provide the MP3 audio files of samples of the spoken language. What a treat to be able to add those to the site! Thank you to Farzan and Ali Asghar!

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