Dari Persian voice over services

Dari is Afghan Persian, one of the two official languages of Afghanistan alongside Pashto. It is written in the Perso-Arabic script, right to left, and it is a standard variety of the same pluricentric language as Iranian Farsi — the two are mutually intelligible, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

What that does not mean is that one substitutes for the other. Dari is phonologically more conservative: it keeps vowel distinctions that Iranian Persian merged centuries ago, and an Afghan listener identifies an Iranian reader within a sentence. The vocabularies have also drifted where it matters most for commercial work — Iranian Persian borrowed much of its modern and technical vocabulary from French, while Dari drew on English and Urdu. That is precisely the vocabulary a corporate video or a training module is built from.

So an Iranian recording aimed at Afghanistan is understood and audibly foreign. For humanitarian, public-health and civic content — which is a large share of Dari work, and where credibility is the whole point — that gap between comprehension and belonging is the difference between a message received and a message trusted.

There is a second decision, and it is the one most often missed. Afghanistan has two official languages and neither covers the country. A campaign recorded only in Dari does not reach Pashto-speaking audiences, and the reverse is equally true. We record both, and for anything national we will usually recommend the pair rather than let you find out later. Our article on the differences between Pashto, Dari and Farsi goes through how they relate.

Typical work is humanitarian and NGO communications, public-health and mine-risk education, refugee and resettlement information, eLearning, government and civic content, broadcast and diaspora media, and corporate material for organisations operating in the region.