Spoken in: Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan and areas of Uzbekistan and western Pakistan. Also in various Iranian/Persian/Afghani diaspora, specifically USA, UAE and Turkey.

Region: Middle East, Central Asia.

Total speakers: ca. 72 million native, ca. 62 million second language, 134 million total.

Language family: Indo-European, Indo-Iranian, Iranian, Western Iranian, Southwestern Iranian, Persian.

Official status
Official language in: Afghanistan, Iran, Tajikistan.

Regulated by: Academy of Persian Language and Literature, Academy of Sciences of Afghanistan.

Persian (local names: فارسی , Fārsi or پارسی , Pārsi) is an Indo-European language spoken in Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. It is derived from the language of the ancient Persian people. It is part of the Indo-European language family.

Persian and its varieties have official-language status in Iran, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan. According to CIA World Factbook, based on old data, there are approximately 62 million native speakers of Persian in Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan and about the same number of people in other parts of the world speak Persian. UNESCO was asked to select Persian as one of its languages in 2006.

Persian has been a medium for literary and scientific contributions to the Islamic world as well as the Western. It has had an influence on certain neighbouring languages, particularly the Turkic languages of Central Asia, Caucasus, and Anatolia. It has had a lesser influence on Arabic and other languages of Mesopotamia.

For five centuries prior to the British colonization, Persian was widely used as a second language in the Indian subcontinent; it took prominence as the language of culture and education in several Muslim courts in India and became the "official language" under the Mughal emperors. Only in 1843 did the subcontinent begin conducting business in English. Evidence of Persian's historical influence in the region can be seen in the extent of its influence on the languages of Hindustani (resulting in Urdu), Kashmiri, Punjabi, Sindhi, Gujarati, and even Telugu, as well as the popularity that Persian literature still enjoys in the region.


Classification

Persian belongs to the Western group of the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European language family, and is of the Subject Object Verb type. Contrary to common belief, it is not a Semitic language. The Western Indo-Iranian group contains other related languages such as Kurdish and Balochi. The language is in the Southwestern Indo-Iranian group, along with the Tat and Luri languages.

Local names

The Persian language is locally known as فارسی‎ (transliteration: Fārsi) or پارسی‎ (Pārsi), local name in Iran, Afghanistan (where it is officially known as Darī) and Tajikistan, Tajik, local name in Central Asia.

Dari, name given to classical Persian poetry and court language, as well as to Persian dialects spoken in Afghanistan, Tajikistan.

Lexical confusion in the West between terms like Farsi, Dari and Tajiki often leads to an underestimation of the breadth of the influence of Persian in Southwest Asia, which is quite important and is a legacy of the millennia-long existence of a Persian cultural sphere, perhaps because this cultural sphere functioned differently than modern nationalism in the West.

Nomenclature

Persian, the more widely used name of the language in English, is an Anglicized form derived from Latin *Persianus < Latin Persia < Greek Πέρσις Pérsis, a Hellenized form of Old Persian Parsa. Farsi is the arabicized form of Parsi, due to a lack of the /p/ phoneme in Standard Arabic. Native Persian speakers typically call it "Fārsi" in modern usage. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term Persian seems to have been first used in English in the mid-16th century. According to Pejman Akbarzadeh, "... many Persians migrating to the West (particularly to the USA) after the 1979 revolution continued to use Persian to identify their language in English and the word became commonplace in English-speaking countries."

The Academy of Persian Language and Literature has argued in an official pronouncement that the name "Persian" is more appropriate, as it has the longer tradition in the western languages and better expresses the role of the language as a mark of cultural and national continuity. On the other hand, "Farsi" is also encountered frequently in the linguistic literature as a name for the language, used both by Iranian and by foreign authors, and is preferred by some.

The international language encoding standard ISO 639-1 uses the code "fa", as its coding system is based on the local names. The more detailed draft ISO 639-3 uses the name "Persian" (code "fas") for the larger unit ("macrolanguage") spoken across Iran and Afghanistan, but "Eastern Farsi" and "Western Farsi" for two of its subdivisions (roughly coinciding with the varieties in Afghanistan and those in Iran, respectively). Ethnologue, in turn, includes "Farsi, Eastern" and "Farsi, Western" as two separate entries and lists "Persian" and "Parsi" as alternative names for each, besides "Irani" for the western and "Dari" for the eastern form.

A similar terminology, but with even more subdivisions, is also adopted by the "Linguist List", where "Persian" appears as a subgrouping under "Southwest Western Iranian". Currently, VOA, BBC, DW, and RFE/RL use "Persian Service", in lieu of "Farsi Service". RFE/RL also includes a Tajik service, and Afghan (Dari) service. This is also the case for the American Association of Teachers of Persian, The Centre for Promotion of Persian Language and Literature, and many of the leading scholars of Persian language.


Persian dialects and varieties

There are three modern varieties for the standard Persian:

- Modern Iranian Persian is the variety of Persian spoken in Iran.

- Dari is the local name for the Persian language spoken in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

- Tajik is the variety of Persian used in Tajikistan, but unlike the Persian used in Iran and Afghanistan, it is written in the Cyrillic script rather than Arabic script.

The three mentioned varieties are based on the classic Persian literature. There are also several local dialects in Iran, Afghanistan and Tajikistan which slightly differ from the standard Persian. Lari (in Iran), Hazaragi (in Afghanistan), and Darwazi (In Afghanistan and Tajikistan) are examples of these dialects.

The Ethnologue offers another classification for dialects of Persian language. According to this source, dialects of this language include the following:

- Western Persian, or Irani (in Iran)

- Eastern Persian (in Afghanistan)

- Tajik (in Tajikistan, Uzbekistan)

- Hazaragi (in Afghanistan)

- Aimaq (in Afghanistan)

- Bukharic (in Israel, Uzbekistan)

- Darwazi (in Afghanistan, Tajikistan)

- Dzhidi (in Israel, Iran)

- Pahlavani (in parts of Sistan and Afghanistan)

The following are some of the related languages of various ethnic groups within the borders of modern-day Iran:

- Luri (or Lori), spoken mainly in the southwestern Iranian province of Lorestan and Khuzestan.

- Talysh (or Talishi), spoken in northern Iran but also in southern parts of the Republic of Azerbaijan.

- Tat (also Tati or Eshtehardi), spoken in parts of the Iranian provinces of East Azarbaijan, Zanjan and Qazvin. It's also spoken in parts of Azerbaijan, Russia, etc. It includes Judeo-Tat & Christian-Tat.

- Dari or Gabri, spoken originally in Yazd and Kerman regions by some Zoroastrians in Iran. Also called Yazdi by some.


Persian grammar

Morphology

Suffixes predominate Persian morphology, though there are a small number of prefixes. Verbs can express tense and aspect, and they agree with the subject in person and number. There is no grammatical gender for nouns, nor are pronouns marked for natural gender.


Persian vocabulary

Native word formation

Persian makes extensive use of word building and combining affixes, stems, nouns and adjectives. Persian frequently uses derivational agglutination to form new words from nouns, adjectives, and verbal stems. New words are extensively formed by compounding – two existing words combining into a new one, as is common in German. Professor Mahmoud Hessaby demonstrated that Persian can derive 226 million words.

External influence

There are many loanwords in the Persian language, mostly coming from Arabic, but also from English, French, German, and the Turkic languages.

Persian has likewise influenced the vocabularies of other languages, especially Indo-Iranian languages like Hindi and Urdu, Turkic languages like Turkish and Uzbek, and Arabic. Several languages of southwest Asia have also been influenced, including Armenian and Georgian. Persian has even influenced the Malay spoken in Malaysia. Many Persian words have also found their way into the English language.


Persian alphabet

Modern Iranian Persian and Dari are normally written using a modified variant of the Arabic alphabet with different pronunciation and more letters, whereas the Tajik variety is typically written in a modified version of the Cyrillic alphabet.

After the conversion of Persia to Islam, it took approximately 150 years before Persians adopted the Arabic alphabet as a replacement for the older alphabet. Previously, two different alphabets were used, one for Middle Persian and one for Avestan, used for religious purposes, known as the Avestan alphabet (in Persian, Dîndapirak or Din Dabire—literally: religion script).

In modern Persian script, vowels generally known as short vowels (a, e, o) are usually not written; only the long vowels (y, u, â) are represented in the text. This, of course, creates certain ambiguities. Consider the following: kerm "worm", karam "generosity", kerem "cream", and krom "chrome" are all spelled "krm" in Persian. The reader must determine the word from context. It is worth noting that the Arabic system of vocalization marks known as harakat is also used in Persian, although some of the symbols have different pronunciations. For example, an Arabic damma is pronounced /u/, while in Iranian Persian it is pronounced /o/. This system is not used in mainstream Persian literature; it is primarily used for teaching and in some (but not all) dictionaries. It is also worth noting that there are several letters considered by native Persian speakers to be 'Arabic' despite the fact that these letters are present in the Persian alphabet. While the letters exist, the Arabic pronunciation of these letters is not generally used. Instead, they are pronounced the same as a similar Persian letter. As such, there are three functionally identical 'z' letters, three 's' letters, two 't' letters, etc.

Variations

The Persian alphabet also modifies some letters from the Arabic alphabet. For example, alef with hamza below ( إ ) changes to alef ( ا ); words using various hamzas get spelled with yet another kind of hamza (so that مسؤول becomes مسئول); and teh marbuta ( ة ) usually, but not always, changes to heh ( ه ) or teh ( ت ). Teh'marbuta is often used in Arabic to denote female gender. Persian nouns do not have gender, which may explain why the teh'marbuta never crossed over to the Persian alphabet.

Writing the letters in their original Arabic form is not typically considered to be incorrect, but is not normally done.

Latin alphabet

UniPers, short for the Universal Persian Alphabet (Pârsiye Jahâni) is a Latin-based alphabet created and popularized by Mohamed Keyvan, who used it in a number of Persian textbooks for foreigners and travellers.

The International Persian Alphabet (Pársik) is another Latin-based alphabet developed in recent years mainly by A. Moslehi, a comparative linguist.

Another Latin alphabet, based on the Uniform Turkic alphabet, was used in Tajikistan in the 1920s and 1930s. The alphabet was phased out in favour of Cyrillic in the late 1930s.

Fingilish, or Penglish, is the name given to texts written in Persian using the Basic Latin alphabet. It is most commonly used in chat, emails and SMS applications. The orthography is not standardized, and varies among writers and even media (for example, typing 'aa' for the phoneme is easier on computer keyboards than on cellphone keyboards, resulting in smaller usage of the combination on cellphones).

Tajik alphabet

Tajik advertisement for an academy.The Cyrillic alphabet was introduced for writing the Tajik language under the Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic in the late 1930s, replacing the Latin alphabet that had been used since the Bolshevik revolution and the Perso-Arabic script that had been used earlier. After 1939, materials published in Persian in the Perso-Arabic script were banned from the country.


History of the Persian language

- Proto-Iranian (ca. 1500 BCE) - Southwestern Iranian languages

- Old Persian (c. 525 BCE - 300 BCE) - Old Persian cuneiform script

- Middle Persian (c.300 BCE-800 CE) - Pahlavi script • Manichaean script • Avestan script

- Modern Persian (from 800) - Perso-Arabic script

Persian is an Iranian tongue belonging to the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European family of languages. The oldest records in Old Persian date back to the great Persian Empire of the 6th century BC.

The known history of the Persian language can be divided into the following three distinct periods:

Old Persian

Old Persian evolved from Proto-Iranian as it evolved in the Iranian plateau's southwest. The earliest dateable example of the language is the Behistun Inscription of the Achaemenid Darius I (r. 522 BCE - ca. 486 BCE). Although purportedly older texts also exist (such as the inscription on the tomb of Cyrus II at Pasargadae), these are actually younger examples of the language. Old Persian was written in Old Persian cuneiform, a script unique to that language and is generally assumed to be an invention of Darius I's reign.

After Aramaic, or rather the Achaemenid form of it known as Imperial Aramaic, Old Persian is the most commonly attested language of the Achaemenid age. While examples of Old Persian have been found wherever the Achaemenids held territories, the language is attested primarily in the inscriptions of Western Iran, in particular in Parsa "Persia" in the southwest, the homeland of the tribes that the Achaemenids (and later the Sassanids) came from.

In contrast to later Persian, written Old Persian had an extensively inflected grammar, with eight cases, each declension subject to both gender - masculine, feminine, neuter - and number - singular, plural, dual.

Middle Persian

In contrast to Old Persian, whose spoken and written forms must have been dramatically different from one another, written Middle Persian reflected oral use, and was thus much simpler than its ancestor. The complex conjugation and declension of Old Persian yielded to a simple internal structure of Middle Persian; the dual number disappeared, leaving only singular and plural, as did gender. Instead, Middle Persian used prepositions to indicate the different roles of words, for example an -i suffix to denote a possessive "from/of" rather than the multiple (subject to gender and number) genitive caseforms of a word.

Although the "middle period" of Iranian languages formally begins with the fall of the Achaemenid Empire, the transition from Old- to Middle Persian had probably already begun before the 4th century. However, Middle Persian is not actually attested until 600 years later when it appears in Sassanid era (224 - 651) inscriptions, so any form of the language before this date cannot be described with any degree of certainty. Moreover, as a literary language, Middle Persian is not attested until much later, to the 6th or 7th century. And from the 8th century onwards, Middle Persian gradually began yielding to New Persian, with the middle-period form only continuing in the texts of Zoroastrian tradition.

The native name of Middle Persian was Parsik or Parsig, after the name of the ethnic group of the southwest, that is, "of Pars", Old Persian Parsa, New Persian Fars. This is the origin of the name Farsi as it is today used to signify New Persian. Following the collapse of the Sassanid state, Parsik came to applied exclusively to (either Middle or New) Persian that was written in Arabic script. From about the 9th century onwards, as Middle Persian was on the threshold of becoming New Persian, the older form of the language came to be erroneously called Pahlavi, which was actually but one of the writing systems used to render both Middle Persian as well as various other Middle Iranian languages. That writing system had previously been adopted by the Sassanids (who were Persians, i.e. from the southwest) from the preceding Arsacids (who were Parthians, i.e. from the northeast). While Rouzbeh (Abdullah Ibn al-Muqaffa, 8th century) still distinguished between Pahlavi (i.e. Parthian) and Farsi (i.e. Middle Persian), this distinction is not evident in Arab commentaries written after that date.

Modern Persian. Classic Persian

The Islamic conquest of Persia marks the beginning of the modern history of Persian language and literature. It is known as the golden era of Persian. It saw world-famous poets and was for a long time the lingua franca of the eastern parts of Islamic world and of the Indian subcontinent. It was also the official and cultural language of many Islamic dynasties, including Samanids, the Mughal Empires, Timurids, Ghaznavid, Seljuq, Safavid, Ottomans, etc. The heavy influence of Persian on other languages can still be witnessed across the Islamic world, especially, and it is still appreciated as a literary and prestigious language among the educated elite, especially in fields of music (for example Qawwali) and art (Persian literature). After the Arab invasion of Persia, Persian began to borrow many words and structures from Arabic and as the time went by, a few words were borrowed from Mongolian under the Mongolian empire.

Modern Persian. Contemporary Persian

Since the nineteenth century, Russian, French and English and many other languages contributed to the technical vocabulary of Persian. The Iranian National Academy of Persian Language and Literature is responsible for evaluating these new words in order to initiate and advise their Persian equivalents. The language itself has greatly developed during the centuries. Due to technological developments, new words and idioms are created and enter into Persian as they do into any other language.