"delight", "sweetness"; in language, literature and poetry, uzubat also means "euphonious" or "melodic". Referring to the 14th-century Persian poet Hafez, Iqbal wrote: English translation: Here qand-e Pārsī ("Rock candy of Persia") is a metaphor for the Persian language and poetry. Persian replaced the Central Asian languages of the Eastern Iranics. Ferghana, Samarkand, and Bukhara were starting to be linguistically Darified in originally Khorezmian and Soghdian areas during Samanid rule. Dari Persian spread around the Oxus River region, Afghanistan, and Khorasan after the Arab conquests and during Islamic-Arab rule. The replacement of the Pahlavi script with the Arabic script in order to write the Persian language was done by the Tahirids in 9th century Khorasan. The Dari Persian language spread and led to the extinction of Eastern Iranian languages like Bactrian, Khwarezmian with only a tiny amount of Sogdian descended Yaghnobi speakers remaining among the now Persian-speaking Tajik population of Central Asia, due to the fact that the Arab-Islamic army which invaded Central Asia also included some Persians who governed the region like the Sassanids. Persian was rooted into Central Asia by the Samanids. Persian phased out Sogdian. The role of lingua franca that Sogdian originally played was succeeded by Persian after the arrival of Islam. Geographical distribution Dari is one of the two official languages of Afghanistan (the other being Pashto). In practice though, it serves as the de facto lingua franca among the various ethnolinguistic groups. Dari is spoken natively by approximately twenty-five percent to eighty percent of the population of Afghanistan as a primary language. Tajiks, who comprise approximately 27% of the population, are the primary speakers, followed by Hazaras (9%) and Aymāqs (4%). Moreover, many Pashtuns living in Tajik and Hazara concentrated areas also use Dari as a first language. The World Factbook states that eighty percent of the Afghan population speaks the Dari language. About 2.5 million Afghans in Iran and Afghans in Pakistan, part of the wider Afghan diaspora, also speak Dari as one of their primary languages. Dari dominates the northern, western, and central areas of Afghanistan, and is the common language spoken in cities such as Mazar-i-Sharif, Herat, Fayzabad, Panjshir, Bamiyan, and the Afghan capital of Kabul where all ethnic groups are settled. Dari-speaking communities also exist in southwestern and eastern Pashtun-dominated areas such as in the cities of Ghazni, Farah, Zaranj, Lashkar Gah, Kandahar, and Gardez. Cultural influence Dari has contributed to