Persian
Language · official in 1 country
Farsi, the language's own name, was once Pārsi; the p became f under the influence of Arabic, which has no p. Persian is a Southwestern Iranian language with three standard varieties: Farsi in Iran, Dari in Afghanistan and Tajik in Tajikistan. Iran writes it in the Persian alphabet, a derivative of the Arabic script.
The language on record
- Own name
- فارسی
- ISO 639-1
- FA
- ISO 639-3
- FAS
- Script
- Arabic
- Family
- Southwestern Iranian
- Official in
- 1 country
Where Persian is official
Iran is the single country on record. Afghanistan and Tajikistan list their standards under the names Dari and Tajik, each with a page of its own.
About Persian
How Old Persian became Farsi
Persian began in Fars, in southwestern Iran. Old Persian was written in cuneiform on inscriptions of the Achaemenid Empire between the 6th and 4th centuries BCE. Middle Persian, official in the Sasanian Empire from 224 to 651, was written in scripts derived from Aramaic. New Persian appears in the Arabic script from the 9th century, after the Muslim conquest, and it descends from Dari, the speech of the Sasanian court at Ctesiphon and of Khorasan, rather than from the literary Middle Persian of Fars. Early New Persian is still largely intelligible to readers today, because the grammar has changed little.
Why courts far from Iran wrote in Persian
Persian was the first language to break the monopoly of Arabic on writing in the Muslim world. The Ottomans in Anatolia, the Delhi Sultanates and the Mughals in India and the Pashtuns in Afghanistan used it in their bureaucracies, although none spoke it natively. From the 11th century it carried Islam and urban culture to Central Asian Turks, and Ottoman Turkish, Chagatai and Urdu were built on its model. The Shahnameh of Ferdowsi, the poems of Rumi and Hafez and the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam were all written in it.
Who tried to purge the loanwords
The dialect of Tehran rose under the Qajars in the 19th century, and Russian, French and English words came in with new technology. A first Persian association, set up in 1903, coined rāh-āhan for railway. The Academy of Iran, founded on 20 May 1935, campaigned through the 1930s and 1940s to replace Arabic, Russian, French and Greek loanwords, and that work underlies Contemporary Standard Persian.
Why the academy prefers Persian to Farsi
The Academy of Persian Language and Literature says Persian is the right name in English, as the older term and a mark of cultural continuity, and that Farsi should be avoided in foreign languages. English has used Farsi widely in recent decades, mostly for the standard of Iran. The word Persian itself reached English in the mid-16th century, through Latin and Greek from Old Persian Pārsa.
Common questions
Questions about Persian
Are Farsi, Dari and Tajik the same language?
They are three mutually intelligible standard varieties of Persian. Dari has been the official name in Afghanistan since 1964, and Tajik in Tajikistan since 1999, where it is written in a Cyrillic-based alphabet.
What family does Persian belong to?
The Western Iranian group of the Iranian languages, part of the Indo-Iranian branch of Indo-European. Within Western Iranian it sits in the southwestern subgroup; Kurdish and Balochi are northwestern.
Which languages borrowed from Persian?
Other Iranian languages, the Turkic languages, Armenian, Georgian, Greek and the Indo-Aryan languages, and to some degree Arabic. Persian in turn took a great deal of vocabulary from Arabic in the Middle Ages.