Dari is the name used in Afghanistan for the country’s variety of Persian. It is one of Afghanistan’s two official languages, alongside Pashto, and it is written in the Perso-Arabic script.
The name is old. From the 10th century, Arabic and Persian authors used darī for the new Persian literary language, and the word is usually traced to dar, ‘court’: the language of the royal court. Literary Persian itself grew out of the speech of Khorasan and Transoxiana, the lands where its first great poets composed their verse.
In Afghanistan the standard language has officially been called Dari since 1964, in place of the name Farsi. Formal written Dari differs little from the Persian of Iran, though everyday speech has its own sounds and vocabulary. Kaboli, the spoken Dari of Kabul, is widely understood across the country, and Dari serves as a common language among Afghans of many different mother tongues.