Persian Language
Persian, the official language of Iran and bearer of one of the world's richest literary traditions, evolving from Old Persian to Modern Persian and central to Iranian identity.
Read in context →At a glance
- Family
- Iranian (Indo-European)
- Stages
- Old, Middle, New Persian
- Speakers
- ~110 million
- Varieties
- Farsi, Dari, Tajik
Detail
Persian (Farsi) is a language of the Iranian branch of the Indo-European family and one of the world's long-lived languages, with a three-stage history: Old Persian (Achaemenid era), Middle Persian/Pahlavi (Sasanian era), and New Persian, which emerged from the ninth century CE after Islam using an adapted Arabic script. New Persian became one of the world's great literary languages through Ferdowsi's Shahnameh and the works of poets such as Rudaki, Hafez, Saadi, and Rumi, and for centuries served as a language of culture and administration from Anatolia to India. Today Persian is the official language of Iran and, in its Dari and Tajik varieties, of Afghanistan and Tajikistan, with around 110 million speakers in total. It is the principal vehicle of Iranian cultural identity and its rich literary heritage.
Related entities
Also appears in
Sources
- Encyclopaedia Iranica — 'Persian Language'
- Britannica — 'Persian language'
- G. Lazard, 'The Origins of Literary Persian'