Persian

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Persian

is the official language of Iran, a country historically known as Persia in Western literature. Persian, called Farsi in Iran, is the native language of over half of the present-day population of 70 million, as well as the medium for instruction, education, mass media, business, and administration among the different ethnic and linguistic communities throughout the country.

Persian is also spoken as a first language by some people in Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, and India. In Afghanistan it is called Dari and with another Iranian language, Pashto, has official status. In Tajikistan, where Persian is the national language, it is called Tajiki.

Persian, Dari, and Tajiki differ from one another in vocabulary, pronunciation of some phonemes, and certain grammatical features, but the speakers of these languages can understand one another and can share the rich Persian literary and cultural heritage.

Iran is a country of considerable language diversity. Apart from Persian, there are other Iranian languages such as Kurdish, Baluchi, and Lori, not to mention non-Iranian (Azeri, Armenian, Arabic) languages spoken by members of various ethnic and religious minorities. Persian shows considerable dialectical variation; people in various parts of Iran speak their own dialects, such as Shirazi, Isfahani, Mashhadi, and Tehrani. The dialect of Tehran, the capital city, is considered the standard contemporary dialect of Persian.

Historical Development

Persian belongs to the Iranian branch of the Indo-Iranian language family, a major subgroup of the Indo-European languages. On the basis of structural as well as historical characteristics, the ancient Iranian languages are classified into two genetically related groups: Western and Eastern.

The Western group consists of Old Persian and Median, whereas the Eastern group includes Scythian and Avestan. Old Persian is assumed to be the ancestor of Middle Persian, which in turn is the ancestor of Modern Persian. The historical development of Persian began as early as the sixth to third centuries BCE, when Old Persian was the official language of the Achaemenid empire (c. 559–c. 530 BCE). The Achaemenid dynasty developed a sophisticated culture, reflected in the cuneiform inscriptions of the kings, such as those discovered in the remains of the royal palaces at Persepolis in southern Iran and on the vast carved monument of Darius the Great at Bisitun in western Iran. (The Bisitun trilingual cuneiform inscriptions provided the key to translating Babylonian and Assyrian cuneiform, undertaken by the British officer Sir Henry Rawlinson in the 1840s.) The Persian cuneiform inscriptions, despite representing a limited corpus of roughly six hundred words, indicate that Old Persian, unlike Middle and Modern Persian, was a highly inflected language with seven cases, three genders, and singular, plural, and dual forms.

Middle Persian, called also Pahlavi, is the language spoken in southwestern Iran from the collapse of the Achaemenid empire to the ninth century CE, during the Islamic period. This language served as the official administrative and literary language of Iran under the rule of the Sasanid dynasty (224–651). A great body of literature and an abundance of material have been preserved in Middle Persian. This language was written in the Pahlavi script, an adaptation of the Aramaic script.

Middle Persian and Modern Persian overlapped, the emergence of Modern Persian coinciding with the Arab conquest of Iran and the conversion of the Iranians to Islam in the seventh century. The oldest records of this language date from the tenth century. Modern Persian is a modified evolutionary form of Middle Persian. Both languages are analytic and are similar in terms of syntactic and morphological characteristics. ("Analytic" means that syntactic relationships are represented by the use of uninflected function words instead of inflections. Inflectionally, both Middle and Modern Persian are much simpler than Old Persian, which was a synthetic or highly inflected language.) Modern Persian first flourished in the eastern and northern regions of Iran and has remained the official language of Iran from the tenth century to the present time.

Linguistic and Literary Characteristics

The modern post-Islamic period in the history of Persian is characterized by the language's strong tendency toward a simplified morphological and syntactic system as compared with Old Persian. During the modern period the Persian vocabulary has been affected by other Iranian and non-Iranian languages. Arabic had the greatest influence on the Persian language, since it was the cultural language of the Islamic world. The slow but constant penetration of thousands of Arabic words into Persian enriched the vocabulary and changed the phonemic and syntactic character of the language to some extent. It also led to the gradual introduction of Arabic script for writing Persian. Arabic was a simpler script than the complicated Middle Persian Pahlavi script. The Arabic alphabet was gradually modified to suit the Persian phonetic system. Four consonants (p, c̆, z̆, and g) were added to the alphabet to represent Persian sounds absent in Arabic. Although the Arabic words that entered the Persian lexicon retain their original orthography (spelling), the pronunciation of some was adapted in accordance with the Persian phonetic structure.

Modern Persian literature has existed for at least one thousand years and has been considered by thinkers such as Goethe one of four main bodies of world literature. Among the treasury of works written in Persian by historians, philosophers, and poets, two noteworthy examples are the national epic poem the Shahnameh (Book of Kings), written by Firdawsi (c. 935–c. 1020) of Tus approximately one thousand years ago, and the mystical poems of Rumi (Jalal ad-Din ar-Rumi, c. 1207–1273) of Balkh, written about seven hundred years ago.