Persian is an Iranian language classified as one of the Indo-European languages. It is widely spoken in Iran, Tajikistan and Afghanistan. Although it is an official language in each of those countries, it is known under different names or perhaps to put it more accurately, there are three different versions of the Persian language. In Iran it is known as Farsi, in Tajikistan as Tajik (Persian) and in Afghanistan as Dari (Persian) or Eastern Persian.
Iran was known internationally as Persia until 1935 which is how the English version of the Persian language name has originated. Tajik and Dari/Eastern are effectively regional dialects which have developed from the Iranian Persian (Farsi) language. Afghanistan also recognises Pashto as an official language
Farsi is also widely spoken in Bahrain (where the official language is Arabic) and Uzbekistan (official language Uzbek).
Farsi, Tajik and Dari are all descended from Middle Persian which was the language of Sassanian Iran. This was the Iranian empire that included Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq, Azerbaijan, Armenia and parts of Turkey, the Arabian Peninsula, Syria, southwest Pakistan and areas of the Persian Gulf. This empire existed from 225 CE to 650 CE (Common Era, Christian Era, or Current Era – it is the same as the Christian AD dating). It ended with the Muslim conquest and the adoption of Islam. During this period the influence of the Sassanid dynasty was so great that even the Romans granted the Sassanid Persians the status of equals. The Sassanid influence meant that the Middle Persian language extended far beyond the boundaries of what is modern-day Iran. Middle Persian can be traced back further to Old Persian, the language of the Achaemenid Empire which existed from 550–330 BCE. While influencing other languages in the region, at the same time Middle Persian was itself changing due to influences from languages such as Arabic. Farsi is actually an Arabic-derived name.
The Muslim conquest of Persia around 650 CE resulted in the Persian language being adopted as the official language of many successive Islamic dynasties which spread its influence even further. Marco Polo used it at the Court of Kubla Khan and during his journeys through China. This influence has even extended as far as Swahili in Africa and the Malay language spoken in Malaysia. It was not until the early 1800’s that English began to replace Persian as the second language used on the Indian sub-continent.
The modern Persian Farsi itself has been extended by the influence of the French, English and Russian languages. In many cases this has been due to the integration of technical terminology. This work is overseen by the Iranian National Academy of Persian Language and Literature. Their Farsi language website can be found here.
Written Persian
Farsi has six vowels and twenty-three consonants. Modern Farsi and Dari are written in a modified form of the Arabic alphabet. It is written from right to left with some letters joined. The short vowels (a, e, o) are usually not written which can lead to some confusion. One common example concerns the words kerm (in English worm), karam (generosity), kerem (cream), and krom (chrome) which are all spelt "krm". The only way to determine which word is intended is by examining the surrounding text to determine the subject matter. Furthermore, a few extra letters have been added to the alphabet purely due to the use of words that have been incorporated from Arabic.
The Persian Alphabet (courtesy of www.geocities.com)
A translation standard has been produced by the ISO to write Persian using Latin characters, but this does not seem to be used much. The Latin alphabet is sometimes used to write Persian texts in somewhat informal modern situations such as emails and SMS applications, but there does not appear to be any standards applied for these as the texts can vary from one writer to another. These writings have been termed Fingilish or Penglish. Other Latin-based alphabets have been devised including the Universal Persian Alphabet (Pârsiye Jahâni) and the International Persian Alphabet (Pársik).
Tajik uses the Cyrillic alphabet (most commonly known as being used for the Russian language). This was introduced by the Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic in the late 1930s and replaced the Latin alphabet which had been used since the Bolshevik revolution.
The Persian language as a whole uses word-building extensively. This is where two or more words are strung together to make one “new” word in a similar manner to the German language. Using this technique, it has been demonstrated that the Persian language can derive or construct 226 million words.
©2009 http://PersianFarsi.org
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I’ve started working on learning Persian using the Rosetta Stone software, and I’ve noticed that when the subject is the sky, sun, or moon, there is no ‘the’ used, as though these are proper names. Any idea where this came from?
hi… can you tell me the meaning of ” KEDAH ” in persian or in old sassanid .. someone told that the name was given iranian from that era.
Not sure what you mean by “Kedah” context would help. However there are words like “May-Kadeh” meaning “Wine House” or “Bot-Kadeh” meaning “Idol House”. Here Kadeh means House. It may also mean village as in “Kad-Khoda” which means “Village Lord”.
If you give me context I could do a better job.
Faramarz