Persian language

Persian, commonly called Farsi by its speakers, is a Western Iranian language that belongs to the Iranian branch of the Indo-Iranian subgroup of Indo-European languages. It is a pluricentric language, meaning it has multiple standard forms. These are Iranian Persian (officially known as Farsi in Iran), Afghan Persian (officially called Dari since 1964), and Tajiki Persian (officially called Tajik since 1999). These three varieties are mutually intelligible and are spoken and used officially in Iran, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan, respectively. The Tajik variety is also natively spoken by a significant population in Uzbekistan, as well as in other regions that historically fell within the cultural sphere of Greater Iran. In Iran and Afghanistan, Persian is written using the Persian alphabet, which is derived from the Arabic script. In Tajikistan, it uses the Tajik alphabet, which is derived from the Cyrillic script.

Modern Persian continues the lineage of Middle Persian, which was the official language of the Sasanian Empire (224–651 CE). Middle Persian itself was a continuation of Old Persian, used in the Achaemenid Empire (550–330 BCE). The language originated in the region of Fars, also known as Persia, in southwestern Iran. Throughout history, various empires in West Asia, Central Asia, and South Asia considered Persian a prestigious language. Old Persian is attested in cuneiform inscriptions from the 6th to 4th centuries BCE. Middle Persian is recorded in scripts derived from Aramaic—Pahlavi and Manichaean—found on inscriptions and in Zoroastrian and Manichaean religious texts from the 3rd to 10th centuries. New Persian literature first appeared in writing in the 9th century, following the Muslim conquest of Persia, and from that point adopted the Perso-Arabic script.

Persian was the first language to break Arabic’s monopoly on writing in the Muslim world, and Persian poetry became a tradition in many eastern courts. Even non-native speakers used it officially as a bureaucratic language, including the Ottomans in Anatolia, the Delhi Sultanates and Mughals in the Indian subcontinent, and the Pashtuns in Afghanistan. Persian influenced neighboring languages and beyond, such as other Iranian languages, Turkic, Armenian, Georgian, Greek, and Indo-Aryan languages. It also exerted some influence on Arabic, while borrowing a great deal of vocabulary from Arabic during the Middle Ages.

Many of the world’s most famous medieval literary works are written in Persian. These include Ferdowsi’s *Shahnameh*, the works of Rumi, the *Rubaiyat* of Omar Khayyam, Nizami Ganjavi’s *Panj Ganj*, Hafez’s *Divân*, Attar of Nishapur’s *The Conference of the Birds*, and Saadi Shirazi’s *Gulistan* and *Bustan*. Prominent modern Persian poets include Nima Yooshij, Ahmad Shamlou, Simin Behbahani, Sohrab Sepehri, Rahi Mo'ayyeri, Mehdi Akhavan-Sales, and Forugh Farrokhzad.

There are approximately 130 million Persian speakers worldwide. These speakers include Persians, Lurs, Tajiks, Hazaras, Iranian Azeris, Iranian Kurds, Balochs, Tats, Afghan Pashtuns, and Aimaqs. A speaker of Persian may also be referred to as a Persophone.

**Classification** Persian belongs to the Western Iranian group of the Iranian languages, which form a branch of the Indo-European languages within the Indo-Iranian subdivision. The Western Iranian languages are split into two subgroups: Southwestern Iranian languages, of which Persian is the most widely spoken, and Northwestern Iranian languages, of which Kurdish and Balochi are the most widely spoken.

**Name** The English term *Persian* comes from Latin *Persiānus*, the adjectival form of *Persia*, which itself derives from Greek *Persís* (Περσίς), a Hellenized form of Old Persian *Pārsa* (𐎱𐎠𐎼𐎿), meaning "Persia"—a region in southwestern Iran corresponding to modern-day Fars. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term *Persian* as a language name first appears in English in the mid-16th century. *Farsi*, the Persian word for the language, has also been used widely in English in recent decades, most often to refer to Iran’s standard Persian. However, *Persian* remains more common. The Academy of Persian Language and Literature maintains that the endonym *Farsi* should be avoided in foreign languages, arguing that *Persian* is the appropriate English designation because it has a longer tradition in Western languages and better expresses the language’s role as a marker of cultural and national continuity. Iranian historian and linguist Ehsan Yarshater, founder of the *Encyclopædia Iranica* and Columbia University’s Center for Iranian Studies, expressed the same concern, rejecting the use of *Farsi* in foreign languages. Etymologically, *Farsi* comes from its earlier form *Pārsi* (Middle Persian *Pārsik*), which shares the same root as the English *Persian*. Similarly, the Middle Persian place name *Pārs* ("Persia") evolved into the modern name *Fars*. The shift from /p/ to /f/ occurred due to Arabic influence in the Middle Ages, as Standard Arabic lacks the phoneme /p/.

**Standard varieties' names** The standard Persian of Iran has been called, besides *Persian* and *Farsi*, names such as *Iranian Persian* and *Western Persian*. The official language of Iran is simply designated as *Persian* (فارسی, *Fārsī*). The standard Persian of Afghanistan has been officially named *Dari* (دری, *Darī*) since 1958. Also called *Afghan Persian* in English, it is one of Afghanistan’s two official languages, alongside Pashto. The term *Dari*, meaning "of the court," originally referred to the variety of Persian used in the Sasanian Empire’s court in the capital Ctesiphon. This variety spread to the empire’s northeast and gradually replaced the former Iranian dialects of Parthia (Parthian). Tajik Persian (форси́и тоҷикӣ́, *forsī-i tojikī*) is the standard variety used in Tajikistan.