Dari is Afghanistan's second official language and the lingua franca of Afghan business and government. It's a variant of Persian — closely related to Farsi spoken in Iran — but with distinctive Afghan vocabulary and pronunciation. Roughly 12-15 million people speak it as a first language, mostly in Afghanistan and northwestern Pakistan. In the US, Dari translation work has surged since the 2021 withdrawal: USCIS asylum paperwork, SIV applications, Afghan school records being evaluated by US universities, and the medical and education intake documents that come with the recently resettled Afghan community. Dari shares its Perso-Arabic script with Farsi.