Persian is written in a modified version of the Arabic script (called Perso-Arabic), with four additional letters (پ چ ژ گ) representing sounds not present in Arabic — but despite this shared script, Persian belongs to a completely different language family than Arabic.

Persian is an Indo-European → Indo-Iranian → Iranian language, making it a distant relative of Hindi, Sanskrit, and the other Indo-Aryan languages in this syllabus (all Indo-European), while Arabic belongs to the unrelated Semitic family.

• ›This is a frequently tested distinguishing fact: sharing a writing SCRIPT does not mean sharing a language FAMILY — Persian and Arabic are written similarly but grammatically unrelated
• ›Persian's Indo-European ancestry means its grammar, while still distinct, is structurally more comparable to Hindi/Sanskrit than to Arabic's root-and-pattern system