For quantized irreducible flag manifolds the locally finite part of the dual coalgebra is shown to coincide with a natural quotient coalgebra $\overline{U}$ of $U_q ( \mathfrak{g} )$. On the way the coradical filtration of $\overline{U}$ is determined. A graded version of the duality between $\overline{U}$ and the quantized coordinate ring is established. This leads to a natural construction of several examples of quantized vector spaces.

As an application, covariant first order differential calculi on quantized irreducible flag manifolds are classified.