Persian language

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Persian (local names: فارسی [fɒrˈsi], Fārsi or پارسی ; see Nomenclature) is an Indo-European language spoken in Iran (Persia), Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Pakistan and the Persian Gulf states. It is derived from the language of the ancient Persian people.

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 64 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 South Asia 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, and other languages of the Indian subcontinent, as well as the popularity that Persian literature still enjoys in that region. Especially, Urdu is a result of predominatly Persian linguistics combining other foreign languages like Arabic, Turkish, and Hindi, along with other regional languages of South Asia and was largely used in Muslim areas of Indian Mughal Empire.

Classification

Persian belongs to the Western group of the Iranian languages 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, Balochi and Zazaish. 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

(transliteration: Fārsi) or (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.

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. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term Persian seems to have been first used in English in the mid-16th century. Native Persian speakers call it "Fārsi" (local name) or Parsi. Farsi is the arabicized form of Parsi, due to a lack of the /p/ phoneme in Standard Arabic.

In English this language is historically known as "Persian". Many Persians migrating to the West (particularly to the USA) after the 1979 revolution continued to use 'Farsi' to identify their language in English. The word became commonplace in English-speaking countries. "Farsi" is 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. However, The Academy of Persian Language and Literature has declared 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.

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.

Dialects and close languages

There are three modern varieties for the standard Persian:

Modern Iranian Persian is the variety of Persian spoken in Iran, also known as Farsi or (Western) Persian.
Dari is the local name for the Persian language spoken in Afghanistan, Uzbekistan and Pakistan. The term Farsi is also very common.
Tajik is the variety of Persian used in Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Russia, 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 is official language of Afghanistan,also spoken in Yazd and Kerman regions by some Zoroastrians in Iran. Also called Yazdi by some.

Phonology

Iranian Persian has six vowels and twenty-three consonants, including two affricates /ʧ/ (ch) and /ʤ/ (j).

Vowels

Historically, Persian distinguished length: the long vowels /iː/, /uː/, /ɒː/ contrasting with the short vowels /e/, /o/, /æ/ respectively. Persian dialects and varieties differ in their vowels, more so than in their consonants.

Consonants

	Labial	Alveolar	Palatal	Glottal
Nasal	m	n
Stop				ʔ
Fricative				h
Tap		ɾ
Approximant		l	j

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 in Persian, nor are pronouns marked for natural gender.

Syntax

Normal declarative sentences are structured as “(S) (PP) (O) V”. This means sentences can comprise optional subjects, prepositional phrases, and objects, followed by a required verb. If the object is specific, then the object is followed by the word rɑ: and precedes prepositional phrases: “(S) (O + “rɑ:”) (PP) V”.

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 other Indo-Iranian languages like Hindi, Urdu, etc, as well as Turkic languages like Turkish and Uzbek, Afro-Asiatic languages like Assyrian and Arabic, and even Dravidian languages especially Telugu and Brahui. Several languages of southwest Asia have also been influenced, including Armenian and Georgian. Persian has even influenced the Malay spoken in Malaysia and Swahili in Africa. Many Persian words have also found their way into European languages including the English language.

The extent of Persian words in use in such languages like Urdu has made these languages often understandable by Persian-speakers, especially in written form.

Orthography

The vast majority of modern Iranian Persian and Dari text is written in a form of the Arabic alphabet. In recent years the Latin alphabet has been used by some for technological or internationalisation reasons. Tajik, which is considered by some linguists to be a Persian dialect influenced by Russian and the Turkic languages of Central Asia, is written with the Cyrillic alphabet in Tajikistan (see Tajik alphabet).

Persian alphabet

Modern Iranian Persian and Dari are normally written using a modified variant of the Arabic alphabet (see Perso-Arabic script) 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 (see Islamic conquest of Iran), 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 (i, 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 /ʊ/, 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.

The lack of short vowels in the orthography helps the writing unify the language all around the territory of the language, i.e., short vowels may be replaced by each other whenever they are pronounced by people from different parts of the territory of the language. For example, pedar, padar, peder, pader can be found as the pronunciations for the word meaning father. Indeed, for daily-used words the ambiguity helps people write and read easily. Moreover, this ambiguity exists also in Pahlavi Handwriting. That is not, however, the case with Arabic, in which changing one vowel can significantly alter the meaning of a word: for example, motahhem (with the short vowel "kasra") means accuser, and motahham (with the short vowel "fatha") means accused, but both are written in the same way. In that sense, Arabic script can be considered more appropriate for the Persian language than for the Arabic language.

It is also worth noting that there are several letters generally only used in Arabic loanwords. These letters are pronounced the same as similar Persian letters. As such, there are four functionally identical 'z' letters, three 's' letters, two 't' letters, etc.

Additions

The Persian alphabet adds four letters to the Arabic alphabet:

Sound	Isolated form	pronunciation
[p]	پ	pe
[tʃ] (ch)	چ	če
[ʒ] (zh)	ژ	že
[g]	گ	gāf

(The že is pronounced as in "measure", "fusion", or "azure".)

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.

The letters different in shape are:

Sound	original Arabic letter	modified Persian letter	name
[k]	ك	ک	kāf
[j] (y) and [iː], or rarely [ɑː]	ي or ى	ى	ye

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 [ɒ] phoneme is easier on computer keyboards than on cellphone keyboards, resulting in smaller usage of the combination on cellphones).

Tajik alphabet

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

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

Early 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.

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.

Examples

Persian	Romanisation	Gloss
همه‌ی افراد بشر آزاد به دنیا می‌آیند و از دید حیثیت و حقوق با هم برابرند, همه دارای اندیشه و وجدان می‌باشند و باید دربرابر یکدیگر با روح برادری رفتار کنند	hameye afrād-e bašar āzād be donyā mi-āyand va az dide heysiyyat-o hoquq bā ham barābarand. hame dārā-ye andiše va vejdān mi-bāšand, va bāyad dar barābar-e yekdigar bā ruh-e barādari raftār konand.	All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

—Article 1 of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights