Persian language
زبان فارسی / Farsi
"Farsi" redirects here. For the village in Iran, see Farsi, Iran.
Persian (/ˈpɜrʒən/ or /ˈpɜrʃən/), also known by its endonym Farsi (English: /ˈfɑrsiː/; Persian: فارسی fārsi [fɒːɾˈsiː] ( listen)), is the predominant modern descendant of Old Persian, a southwestern Iranian language within the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European languages. It is primarily spoken in Iran, Afghanistan (officially known as Dari since 1958 for political reasons),[8] and Tajikistan (officially known as Tajiki since the Soviet era for political reasons),[9] and some other regions 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 Achaemenid Persian Empire.[10][11][12] Persian is a pluricentric language and its grammar is similar to that of many contemporary European languages.[13] Persian is so-called due to its origin from the capital of the Achaemenid empire, Persis (Fars or Pars), hence the name Persian (Farsi or Parsi)[citation needed]. A Persian-speaking person may be referred to as Persophone.[14]
There are approximately 110 million Persian speakers worldwide, with the language holding official status in Iran, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan. For centuries, Persian has also been a prestigious cultural language in other regions of Western Asia, Central Asia, and South Asia by the various empires based in the regions.[15]
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, Georgian, and Indo-Aryan languages, especially Urdu. It also exerted some influence on Arabic, particularly Bahrani Arabic,[16] while borrowing much vocabulary from it after the Muslim conquest of Persia.[10][13][17][18][19][20]
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.[15] Some of the famous works of Persian literature are the Shahnameh ('Book of Kings') of Ferdowsi, works of Rumi, Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, Divan ('miscellany') of Hafiz and the two miscellanea of prose and verse by Sa'di of Shiraz, the Golestān (lit., 'flower garden') and the Būstān (also meaning "garden;" lit., 'a place of fragrance').
Classification[edit]
Persian belongs to the Western branch of the Iranian family of Indo-European languages, which also includes Kurdish, Gilaki, Mazandarani, Talyshi, and Baluchi. The language is in the Southwestern Iranian group, along with the Larestani, Kumzari, and Luri languages.
History
Persian is an Iranian language belonging to the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European family of languages. In general, Iranian languages are known from three periods, usually referred to as Old, Middle, and New (Modern) periods. These correspond to three eras in Iranian history; Old era being the period from sometime before Achaemenids, the Achaemenid era and sometime after Achaemenids (that is to 400–300 BC), Middle era being the next period most officially Sassanid era and sometime in post-Sassanid era, and the New era being the period afterwards down to present day.[40]
According to available documents, the Persian language is "the only Iranian language"[10][41] for which close philological relationships between all of its three stages are established and so that Old, Middle, and New Persian represent[10][42] one and the same language of Persian, that is New Persian is a direct descendant of Middle and Old Persian.[42]
The known history of the Persian language can be divided into the following three distinct periods: .
