Different reasons caused us to develop PERPHON (phonetic alphabet with Latin letters) for the Persian language:

• Our main reason was, that many Iranian families, who have been living abroad for a long time and have children, are faced with the problem of their children knowing the Persian pronunciations but have never learnt to read and write their native language. Therefore children can never know the literary culture of Iran.
  


• The second reason refers to an old problem that Iranian musicians have been dealing with for a long time. For the Persian alphabet is written from the right to the left they always had the problem to write the notes and lyrics together and harmonic. With PERPHON this is possible now.
  


• The third reason that induced us to this step, is the relation between Iranians and other nationalities. It happened many times, that a friendship has taught Persian to a friend by the way of talking but hasn't taught him the writing. A phonetic language makes this possible.
  


• The fourth reason was to give Iranians all over the world the chance to communicate with computers and computer networks. Nowadays computer networks like CompuServe or AOL in Internet are a worldwide tool for communication. For Iranians it is very hard to perform such a conversation in Persian writing. There is no standard for "Farsi". They can only communicate with computers in English language. With PERPHON we tried to standardize the international communication.

It has to be mentioned, that we are not the first making efforts in the topic. About 100 years ago the language teachers of that time had tried to invent a phonetic alphabet for the musicians or the right pronunciation for Persian-Persian dictionaries. In the moment there is a Persian magazine in London, which publishes a few pages with such a writing in every issue. There is even a commission that has dealt with this problem. But at all the attempts for this the problems of the different computer systems were not considered. For this reason we have tried to create a new phonetic alphabet, based on the old attempts, that is superior in this matter. We did not start at the beginning, but have tried to improve the existing definitions.

It also has to be mentioned, that we are not intending at all to replace the Persian alphabet by a new one adapted to the Latin alphabet (what Attaturk in Turkey has done). We tried to renew the old definition and to cancel the exclusions. We know that our PERPHON is not perfect and have an open ear for any clever critical comments.