Persian Language

Persian Language

Persian (local name: فارسی farsi or Parsi) is an Iranian language within the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European languages. "The official language of Iran/Persia is sometimes called Farsi/Parsi in English and other languages. This is a transliteration of the native name of the language, however many, including the ISO and the Academy of Persian Language and Literature, prefer the name Persian for the language. Some speakers use the older local name: Parsi (پارسی parsi )." "The name Persian derives from the province of Pārs (modern Fārs) in southwestern Iran."

Persian is primarily spoken in Iran/Persia, Afghanistan (as Dari since 1958 due to political reasons), Tajikistan (as Tajik due to political reasons by the USSR), and countries which historically came under Persian influence. The Persian language is classified as a continuation of Middle Persian, the official religious and literary language of Sassanid Persia, itself a continuation of Old Persian, the language of the Persian Empire in the Achaemenid era. Persian is a pluricentric language and its grammar is similar to that of many contemporary European languages.

Persian has ca. 110 million native speakers, holding official status respectively in Iran, Afghanistan and Tajikistan. For centuries Persian has also been a prestigious cultural language in Central Asia, South Asia, and Western Asia.

Persian has had a considerable, mainly lexical influence on neighboring languages, particularly the Turkic languages in Central Asia, Caucasus, and Anatolia, neighboring Iranian languages, as well as Armenian, and Indo-Aryan languages, especially Urdu. It also exerted some influence on Arabic, particularly Iraqi Arabic and Khuzestani Arabic, while borrowing much vocabulary from it after the Muslim conquest of Persia.

With a long history of literature in the form of Middle Persian before Islam, Persian was the first language in Muslim civilization to break through Arabic’s monopoly on writing, and the writing of poetry in Persian was established as a court tradition in many eastern courts. Some of the famous works of Persian literature are the Shahnameh of Ferdowsi, works of Rumi (Molana), Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, Divan of Hafiz and poems of Saadi.