Persian language

• 1. Introduction

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  Persian, known by its own speakers as Farsi, broke a monopoly that had held across the Muslim world. Arabic had dominated writing, but Persian became the first language to push past it. Its poetry took root in courts far from where it began. Around 130 million people speak it today, across Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and beyond. It belongs to the Western Iranian group of the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European family. The names attached to it carry their own arguments. Some call it Farsi, some insist on Persian, and a national academy has taken sides. How did a language from one province in southwestern Iran end up the official tongue of Ottomans, Mughals, and Pashtuns who never spoke it natively? And how did one language survive, recognizably itself, across more than two thousand years of recorded history?

• 2. Three Tongues, One Name

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  Iran, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan each speak a standard variety of the same language, mutually intelligible across borders. Iran calls its variety simply Persian. Afghanistan officially named its variety Dari in 1958, and it stands as one of the country's two official languages alongside Pashto. The word Dari means "of the court," and once referred to the Persian used at the Sasanian court in the capital Ctesiphon. Tajikistan, since the Soviet era, has officially called its variety Tajik. Tajik Persian also lives natively among a significant population inside Uzbekistan. The same language wears different scripts depending on the border. Iran and Afghanistan write it in the Persian alphabet, a derivative of the Arabic script. Tajikistan writes it in the Tajik alphabet, a derivative of Cyrillic. The international standard ISO 639-1 assigns Persian the code fa, while the finer-grained ISO 639-3 splits it into prs for Dari, pes for Iranian Persian, and tgk for Tajik.

• 3. Farsi Or Persian

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  The Academy of Persian Language and Literature has taken a firm position: the endonym Farsi should be avoided in foreign languages. The Academy argues that Persian is the proper English designation, since it carries the longer tradition in western languages and better expresses the role of the language as a mark of cultural and national continuity. Ehsan Yarshater shared the same concern. As the founder of the Encyclopaedia Iranica and Columbia University's Center for Iranian Studies, this Iranian historian and linguist rejected the use of Farsi in foreign languages in an academic journal on Iranology. The word Persian itself traces a long path. It is an English derivation of Latin Persianus, the adjectival form of Persia, which came from a Greek Hellenized form of Old Persian Parsa, meaning a region in southwestern Iran. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, Persian as a language name is first attested in English in the mid-16th century. Farsi has a sound-change story behind it. Its earlier form was Parsi, and the shift from a /p/ to an /f/ came from the influence of Arabic, which lacks the /p/ sound. By the same process, the toponym Pars became the modern name Fars.

• 4. One Language, Three Ages

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  Among all the Iranian languages, Persian holds a singular distinction: it is the only one for which close philological links between all three of its stages are established. Old, Middle, and New Persian represent one and the same language, with New Persian a direct descendant of the earlier two. Old Persian survives in royal Achaemenid inscriptions, written in Old Persian cuneiform. The oldest known text is from the Behistun Inscription, dating to King Darius I, who reigned from 522 to 486 BCE. Examples have been found in present-day Iran, Romania, Armenia, Bahrain, Iraq, Turkey, and Egypt. It is one of the earliest attested Indo-European languages. Assyrian records of the 9th century BCE mention the Parsuwash near Lake Urmia, in the records of Shalmaneser III. Middle Persian carried the structure forward but simplified it. The dual number disappeared, leaving singular and plural, and grammatical gender vanished. It developed the ezafe construction, expressed through an ī sound, to mark relations between words. As a literary language it is not attested until the 6th or 7th century. Gernot Windfuhr considers New Persian an evolution of both earlier forms, while noting that no known Middle Persian dialect is the direct predecessor of the modern language.

• 5. Breaking The Monopoly

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  New Persian texts in the Arabic script first appear in the 9th century, after the Muslim conquest of Persia. The language descends not from the literary Middle Persian of Fars, called Pahlavi, but from the dialect of the Sasanian court at Ctesiphon and the northeastern region of Khorasan, known as Dari. Abbas of Merv is named as the earliest minstrel to chant verse in the New Persian tongue. After him, the poems of Hanzala Badghisi ranked among the most famous of the time. The first significant Persian poet was Rudaki, who flourished in the 10th century when the Samanids were at the height of their power. He earned a reputation as a court poet and as an accomplished musician and singer, though little of his poetry has survived. Among his lost works were versified fables collected in the Kalila wa Dimna. The transition to New Persian was complete by the era of three princely dynasties of Iranian origin: the Tahirid dynasty from 820 to 872, the Saffarid dynasty from 860 to 903, and the Samanid Empire from 874 to 999. From the 11th century the language spread, becoming the medium through which Central Asian Turks grew familiar with Islam and urban culture. In the late Middle Ages, new literary languages were built on the Persian model: Ottoman Turkish, Chagatai Turkic, Dobhashi Bengali, and Urdu, all regarded as structural daughter languages of Persian.

• 6. Language Of Courts

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  Marco Polo knew Persian. It was the only non-European language he used at the court of Kublai Khan and on his journeys through China. The reach of Classical Persian, the standardized medieval language of literature and poetry, stretched far beyond its homeland. It served as the lingua franca of Greater Persia and much of the Indian subcontinent. The Sultanate of Rum, a branch of the Seljuks, carried Persian language, art, and letters to Anatolia and made it the official language of the empire. The Ottomans inherited this tradition. Sultan Selim I spoke Persian, even though he was the archrival of Safavid Iran and a staunch opponent of Shia Islam. Idris Bidlisi's Hasht Bihisht, begun in 1502, covered the reign of the first eight Ottoman rulers. Persian learning reached deep into the Ottoman-held Balkans. The town of Vardar Yenicesi, now Giannitsa in northern Greece, stood out because Persian was also widely spoken there. Its accent and vocabulary differed enough that the Ottomans called it Rumelian Persian. The 16th-century writer Asik Celebi, who came from Prizren, called the city a "hotbed of Persian." In South Asia, Persian became the sole official language under the Mughal emperors. The Bengal Sultanate drew an influx of Persian scholars and clerics, and the reign of Sultan Ghiyathuddin Azam Shah is described as the golden age of Persian literature in Bengal. That Sultan even corresponded and collaborated with the Persian poet Hafez, in a poem found in the Divan of Hafez today.

• 7. Building A Standard

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  In the 19th century, under the Qajar dynasty, the dialect spoken in Tehran rose to prominence. Russian, French, and English terms entered the language, especially vocabulary tied to technology. The first official attention to protecting Persian from foreign words came under Naser ed Din Shah in 1871. After him, Mozaffar ed Din Shah ordered the establishment of the first Persian association in 1903, which declared Persian and Arabic acceptable sources for coining words. It produced new terms such as rah-ahan for "railway," printed in Soltani Newspaper, though the association eventually closed due to inattention. The first academy for the language was founded on the 20th of May 1935, under the name Academy of Iran. Reza Shah Pahlavi initiated it, working through Hekmat e Shirazi and Mohammad Ali Foroughi, prominent names in the nationalist movement. Through the 1930s and 1940s the academy ran campaigns to replace Arabic, Russian, French, and Greek loanwords. This effort became the basis of what is now Contemporary Standard Persian. The borrowing had run deep. John R. Perry estimates that about 20 percent of everyday vocabulary in current Persian is of Arabic origin, rising to around 25 percent in classical and modern literature. Most of those Arabic words are either synonyms of native terms or could be glossed in Persian.

• 8. Sounds And Scripts

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  Iranian Persian carries twenty-three consonants, while both Dari and Tajiki carry twenty-four, a difference that comes from the merger of two sounds in Iranian Persian. The vowel systems split as well: Iranian Persian and Tajik have six vowels, while Dari has eight. Early New Persian once held a series of five long vowels and three short ones, but in the general area of modern Iran, before the 16th century, certain long vowels merged. This erased old contrasts such as sher "lion" against shir "milk," and zud "quick" against zor "strength." Dari preserves the archaic distinctions that Iran lost, making contemporary Afghan Dari the closest to the vowel inventory of Early New Persian. Modern Persian carries no grammatical gender, and its pronouns are gender-neutral, though Old Persian once had gender. The language follows mainly subject-object-verb word order, with suffixes that allow speakers to vary it. When the object is specific, it is followed by the word ra. The script adds its own ambiguities. Historically short vowels are usually not written, so words distinguished only by short vowels look alike: kerm "worm," karam "generosity," kerem "cream," and krom "chrome" are all spelled krm. After the Arab conquest of Persia, it took roughly 200 years before Persians adopted the Arabic script in place of the older alphabet. The Persian alphabet added four letters absent from Arabic, pe, che, zhe, and gaf, and there was once a fifth letter for a /β/ sound that fell out of use as the sound changed to /b/, turning archaic zaban into the modern word for "language."