'Persian' (local names: فارسی or پارسی ; see
Nomenclature) is an
Indo-European language spoken in
Iran,
Afghanistan and
Tajikistan, and by minorities in
Uzbekistan,
Turkmenistan,
Azerbaijan, and countries like
Bahrain,
Qatar and
Kuwait and elsewhere. It is derived from the language of the ancient
Persian people. It is part of the
Iranian branch of the
Indo-European language family.
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 62 million native speakers of Persian in
Iran,
[2] Afghanistan,
[3] Tajikistan[4] and
Uzbekistan[5] 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.
[BBC]
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
India and became the "official language" under the
Mughal emperors. Only in 1843 did the subcontinent begin conducting business in English.
[6] Evidence of Persian's historical influence in the region can be seen in the extent of its influence on the languages of
Hindustani (resulting in
Urdu),
Marathi,
Punjabi,
Sindhi, and
Gujarati, as well as the popularity that
Persian literature still enjoys in the region. Additionally, a small population of Persian speakers (mostly of the
Dari and
Tajik dialects) can be found in the urban and western highlands of
Pakistan.
Classification
Farsi belongs to the
Western group of the
Indo-Iranian 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 and
Balochi. The language is in the
Southwestern Indo-Iranian group, along with the
Tat and
Luri languages.
[7]
Green denotes official language status; orange denotes minority language.
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, and
Pakistan.
Lexical confusion in the West between terms like Farsi, Dari and Tajiki often leads to an underestimation of the breadth of the influence of Persian in Southwest Asia, which is quite important and is a legacy of the millennia-long existence of a Persian cultural sphere, perhaps because this cultural sphere functioned differently than modern nationalism in the West.
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''. ''Farsi'' is the
arabicized form of Parsi, due to a lack of the /p/ phoneme in Standard Arabic. Native Persian speakers typically call it "Fārsi" in modern usage. In English, however, the language continued to be known as "Persian" during the first half of the 20th century. According to the
Oxford English Dictionary, the term 'Farsi' seems to have been first used in English in the mid-20th century, but has been condemned by some critics as an affectation.
[8] According to
Pejman Akbarzadeh, "... many Persians migrating to the West (particularly to the USA) after the 1979 revolution continued to use 'Farsi' to identify their language in English and the word became commonplace in English-speaking countries."
[9]
The
Academy of Persian Language and Literature has argued in an official pronouncement
[10] 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. On the other hand, "Farsi" is also encountered frequently in the linguistic literature as a name for the language, used both by Iranian and by foreign authors,
[11] and is even preferred by some.
[12]
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).
[13] 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.
[14][15]
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".
[16] 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.
[17]
Dialects and close languages
Main articles: Persian dialects and varieties
There are three modern varieties for the standard Persian:
★
Modern Iranian Persian is the variety of Persian spoken in
Iran.
[18][19]
★
Dari is the local name for the Persian language spoken in
Afghanistan.
★
Tajik is the variety of Persian used in Tajikistan, 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:
[20]
★ 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, spoken originally in
Yazd and
Kerman regions by some Zoroastrians in Iran. Also called
Yazdi by some.
Phonology
Main articles: Persian phonology
Iranian Persian has six vowels and twenty-three consonants, including two affricates (ch) and (j).
Vowels
The vowel phonemes of Persian
Historically, Persian distinguished length: the long vowels , , contrasting with the short vowels , , respectively. Persian dialects and varieties differ in their vowels, more so than in their consonants.
Consonants
Grammar
Main articles: Persian grammar
Morphology
Suffixes predominate Persian morphology, though there are a small number of prefixes.
[21] Verbs can express tense and aspect, and they agree with the subject in person and number.
[22] There is no
grammatical gender for nouns, 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 ''r:'' and precedes prepositional phrases: “(S) (O + “r:”) (PP) V”.
Vocabulary
Main articles: Persian 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.
[23]
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
Indo-Iranian languages like
Hindi and
Urdu,
Turkic languages like
Turkish and
Uzbek, and
Arabic.
[24] Several languages of southwest Asia have also been influenced, including
Armenian and
Georgian. Persian has even influenced the
Malay spoken in Malaysia. Many Persian words have also found their way into the English language.
''See also: ''
List of English words of Persian origin and
Comparison Table of the Iranian Languages
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,
[ A Tajik Persian Reference Grammar, , John R., Perry, Brill, 2005, ][25] is written with the
Cyrillic alphabet in
Tajikistan (see
Tajik alphabet).
Persian alphabet
Main articles: 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 (y, 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 /u/, 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. It is also worth noting that there are several letters considered by native Persian speakers to be 'Arabic' despite the fact that these letters are present in the Persian alphabet. While the letters exist, the Arabic pronunciation of these letters is not generally used. Instead, they are pronounced the same as a similar Persian letter. As such, there are three 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' | 'Unicode name' |
| [p] | پ | Peh |
| (ch) | چ | Cheh |
| (zh) | ژ | Jeh |
| [g] | گ | Gaf |
(The ''Jeh'' sound 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 | Kaf |
| [j] (y) and , or rarely | ي or ى | ی | Yeh |
Writing the letters in their original Arabic form is not typically considered to be incorrect, but is not normally done.
Latin alphabet
Main articles: Romanization of Persian
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.
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.
, 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
Main articles: Tajik alphabet
Tajik advertisement for an academy.
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
Main articles: History of the Persian language
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.
[26]
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 |
|---|
| همه ی افراد بشر آزاد به دنیا میآیند و از دید حیثیت و حقوق با هم برابرند, همه دارای اندیشه و وجدان میباشند و باید دربرابر یک دیگر با روح برادری رفتار کنند. | Hameye afrâde bašar âzâd be donyâ miyâyand va az dide heysiyat o hoquq bâ ham barâbarand. Hame dârâye andisheh o vejdân mibâšand va bâyad dar barabare yekdigar bâ ruhe barâdari raftâr 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. |
See also
★
Academy of Persian Language and Literature
★
Dzhidi language
★
List of Persian poets and authors
★
Persianate
★
Persian literature
★
Persian mythology
★
Notes
1. 2006 CIA Factbook: Iran 39 M (58%), Afghanistan 15 M (50%), Tajikistan 5.8 M (80%), Uzbekistan 1.2 M (4.4%)
2. CIA Factbook: Iran
3. CIA Factbook: Afghanistan
4. CIA Factbook: Tajikistan
5. CIA Factbook: Uzbekistan
6. Eternal Iran, , Patrick, Clawson, Palgrave Macmillan, 2004,
7. Windfuhr, G. L. (1987), "Persian", in Bernard Comrie (ed.), ''The World's Major Languages'', pp. 523--546 (Oxford: Oxford University Press)
8. Article "Farsi", in ''Oxford English Dictionary,'' second edition, ed. John Simpson and Edmund Weiner, Clarendon Press, 1989. ISBN 0-19-861186-2.
9.
10. Pronouncement of the Academy of Persian Language and Literature
11. For example: A. Gharib, M. Bahar, B. Fooroozanfar, J. Homaii, and R. Yasami. ''Farsi Grammar.'' Jahane Danesh, 2nd edition, 2001.
12. I Speak Farsi Sussan Tahmasebi
13. Documentation for ISO 639 identifier: fas
14. Ethnologue: Code PRS
15. Ethnologue: Code PES
16. Linguist List: Tree for Southwest Western Iranian
17. Kamran Talattof Persian or Farsi? The debate continues...
18. Henderson, M. M. T. (1994) "Modern Persian Verb Stems Revisited" in ''Journal of the American Oriental Society'', Vol. 114, No. 4. (Oct. - Dec., 1994), pp. 639–641.
19. Keshavarz, M. H. (1988) "Forms of Address in Post-Revolutionary Iranian Persian: A Sociolinguistic Analysis" in ''Language in Society'', Vol. 17 No. 4 p565-75 Dec 1988
20. Ethnologue - Language Family Trees - Persian
21.
22. Persian, , Shahrzad, Mahootian, Routledge, 1997,
23. http://www.fareiran.com/no26/1.htm
24. Bashgah
25. Charactères distinctifs de la langue Tadjik, , Gilbert, Lazard, Bulletin de la Société Linguistique de Paris, 1956
26. The Languages of the World, , Kenneth, Katzner, Routledge, 2002,
Further reading
#.
#.
#.
External links
★
AriaDic Persian / English Dictionary with pronunciation
★
Collection of Persian bilingual dictionaries
★
UCLA Language Materials Project: Persian
★
Academic Grammar of New Persian in Persian, English and German
★
English Persian equivalent words
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