Origins
After the Arab Muslim conquest of Iran, Pahlavi, the language of Pre-Islamic Iran, continued in wide use well into the second Islamic century (8th century) as a medium of administration in the eastern lands of the Caliphate. Despite the Islamisation of public affairs, the Iranians retained much of their pre-Islamic outlook and way of life, adjusted to fit the demands of Islam. Towards the end of the 7th century, the population began resenting the cost of sustaining the Arab Caliphs, the Umayyads, and in the 8th century, a general Iranian uprising—led by the Iranian national hero Abu Muslim Khorrasani—brought another Arab family, the Abbasids, to the Caliph's throne.
Under the Abbasids, the capital transferred from Syria to Iraq, which had once been part of the Sassanid Empire, and was still considered to be part of the Iranian cultural domain. Persian culture, and the customs of the Persian Barmakid viziers, became the style of the ruling elite. Politically, the Abbasids soon started losing their control to Iranians. The governors in Khurasan, the Tahirids, though appointed by the caliph, were effectively independent. When the Persian Saffarids from Sistan freed the eastern lands, Buyyids in Western Iran, Ziyarids in Mazandaran, and in the north-west the Samanids announced their independencies.
The separateness of the eastern lands from Baghdad was expressed in a distinctive Persianate culture that became dominant in west, central, and south Asia, and was the source of innovations elsewhere in the Islamic world. The Persianate culture was marked by the use of the New Persian language as a medium of administration and intellectual discourse, by the rise of Persianised-Turks to military control, by the new political importance of non-Arab ulama, and by the development of an ethnically composite Islamic society.
Pahlavi was the lingua franca of the Sasanian Empire before the Arab invasion, but towards the end of the 7th and the beginning of the 8th century Arabic became a medium of literary expression. In the 9th century, a New Persian language emerged as the idiom of administration and literature. Persian dynasties of Tahirids and Saffarids continued using Persian as an informal language, although for them Arabic was the "language for recording anything worthwhile, from poetry to science", but the Samanids made Persian a language of learning and formal discourse. The language that appeared in the 9th and 10th centuries was a new form of Persian, derivative of on the Middle-Persian of pre-Islamic times, but enriched by ample Arabic vocabulary and written in Arabic script.
The Persian language was, according to Marshall Hodgson in his The Venture of Islam, to form the chief model for the rise of still other languages to the literary level. Like Turkish, most of the more local languages of high culture that later emerged among Muslims depended upon Persian . One may call these traditions, carried in Persian or reflecting Persian inspiration, ‘Persianate’ by extension. This seems to be the origin of the term Persianate.
Read more about this topic: Persianate Society
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