Languages of Iran

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Languages of Iran
Persian sign at the Tarbiyat library in Tabriz
Official	Persian
Main	Persian 53%, Azerbaijani and other Turkic dialects 18% (e.g Afshar dialect, Chaharmahali Turkic, Khalaj, Khorasani Turkic, Qashqai, Sonqori dialect, Turkmen), Kurdish 10%, Gilaki and Mazandarani 7%, Luri 6%, Arabic 2%, Balochi 2%, and other languages (Tati, Talysh, Armenian, Georgian, Assyrian, Circassian) 1%[1]
Minority	Armenian, Georgian, Circassian, Hebrew, and Assyrian
Foreign	English, Russian, French
Signed	Persian Sign Language
Keyboard layout	ISIRI 9147

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Iran's ethnic diversity means that the languages of Iran come from a number of linguistic origins, although the primary language spoken and used is Persian. The Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran asserts that the Persian language alone must be used for schooling and for all official government communications. The constitution also recognizes Arabic as the language of Islam, and assigns it formal status as the language of religion. Although multilingualism is not encouraged, the use of minority languages is permitted in the course of teaching minority-language literature. Different publications have reported different statistics for the languages of Iran; however, the top three languages spoken are consistently reported as Persian, Azeri and Kurdish.