Persian / Farsi

Persian is a member of the Iranian branch of the Indo-European language family. It is spoken by an estimated 71 million people, primarily in Iran, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan.

The language has several names which will be explained below:

•   Persian is the more widely used name of the language in English, from Latin Persia 'Persia,' from Greek Persis. The Academy of Persian Language and Literature calls the language Persian.
•   Farsi is the Arabicised form of Parsi from Pars, the name of the region where the language evolved. Pars is called Fars in Arabic which lacks the sound [p].
•   Dari is the local name used for the Persian language in Afghanistan. There are several competing theories regarding the origin of the name.
•   Tajik (Tajiki) is the local name used for Persian in Tajikistan.

Old Persian and its descendant, Middle Persian, are thought to have originated in Parsa (or Fars), the cent of the Persian Empire in southwest Iran. Old Persian is attested from the inscriptions left by the Achaemenid Dynasty (559 to 331 BC) which ruled the territory that is now Iran until the conquest of Alexander the Great. Middle Persian, also known as Pahlavi, after the Parthians who ruled Persia after the collapse of Alexander's Empire, is attested by pre-Islamic Zoroastrian religious writings. There is no conclusive evidence that these languages are the ancestors of Modern Persian.

The bulk of the surviving Persian literature comes from the times following the Islamic conquest of Iran in the 7th-8th centuries AD when the Persians, who wrote in both Persian and Arabic, became the scribes and bureaucrats, as well as writers and poets of the Islamic empire. Persian poets such as Saadi, Hafez, Omar Khayyam and Rumi have left a significant mark on the literature of many countries.

•   Western Farsi is spoken as a 1st language by over 22 million people in Iran, a multilingual country, out of a total population of 68 million. It is the official language of Iran. It is also spoken in a number of countries in the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent, Europe, Australia, and North America. It is estimated that there are 24.5 million speakers of Western Farsi worldwide (Ethnologue).

•   Eastern Farsi (Dari) is the mother tongue of about 7.6 million people in Afghanistan, the Khorasan Province of Iran, and in Pakistan (Ethnologue). It is the co-official language of Afghanistan, along with Pashto.

•   Tajik is spoken by 4.5 million people in the Republics of Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, former Soviet republics in Central Asia (Ethnologue). Tajik is the official language of Tajikistan.

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