Language
During the Rashidun Caliphate, the official language of Persia remained Persian, just as the official languages of Syria and Egypt remained Greek and Coptic. However, during the Ummayad Caliphate, the Ummayads imposed Arabic as the primary language of their subjected people throughout their empire, displacing their indigenous languages. Although an area from Iraq to Morocco speaks Arabic to this day, Middle Persian proved to be much more enduring. Most of its structure and vocabulary survived, evolving into the modern Persian language. However, Persian did incorporate a certain amount of Arabic vocabulary, especially words pertaining to religion, and it switched from the Pahlavi Aramaic alphabet to a modified version of the Arabic alphabet.
Read more about this topic: Muslim Conquest Of Persia
Famous quotes containing the word language:
“The language of the younger generation ... has the brutality of the city and an assertion of threatening power at hand, not to come. It is military, theatrical, and at its most coherent probably a lasting repudiation of empty courtesy and bureaucratic euphemism.”
—Elizabeth Hardwick (b. 1916)
“Like the train’s beat
Swift language flutters the lips
Of the Polish airgirl in the corner seat.”
—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)
“It would seem as if the very language of our parlors would lose all its nerve and degenerate into palaver wholly, our lives pass at such remoteness from its symbols, and its metaphors and tropes are necessarily so far fetched.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)