Persian language: Difference between revisions

"Farsi" redirects here. For other uses, see Farsi (disambiguation).

Persian
Template:Rtl-lang
Native to	Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan and also in parts of neighboring countries (e.g., Uzbekistan, Iraq, Azerbaijan, Georgia)
Region	Middle East, Central Asia
Native speakers	ca. 62 million native, ca. 40 million second language, 100 million total
Language family	Indo-European Indo-Iranian Iranian Western Iranian Southwestern Iranian Persian
Official status
Official language in	Iran, Tajikistan (as Tajik), Afghanistan (as Dari)
Regulated by	Academy of Persian Language and Literature Academy of Sciences of Afghanistan
Language codes
ISO 639-1	fa
ISO 639-2	per (B) fas (T)
ISO 639-3	Variously: fas – Persian prs – Eastern Persian pes – Western Persian tgk – Tajik aiq – Aimaq bhh – Bukharic deh – Dehwari drw – Darwazi haz – Hazaragi jpr – Dzhidi phv – Pahlavani

Persian (Local names: فارسی Fârsi or پارسی Pârsi)^* is an Indo-European language spoken in Iran, Afghanistan and Tajikistan as well as by minorities in Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, India, Pakistan, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia, Southern Russia, neighboring countries, and elsewhere. It is derived from the language of the ancient Persian people. It is part of the Iranian branch of the Indo-Iranian 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 , Afghanistan , Tajikistan and Uzbekistan and there are about the same number of other people who can speak Persian throughout the world. UNESCO was asked to select Persian as one of its languages in 2006.

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 of India, Persian was widely used as a second or first language in the Indian subcontinent; it took prominence as the language of culture and education in several Muslim courts in the subcontinent and became the "official language" under the Mughal emperors. Only in 1843 did the subcontinent to begin conducting business in English instead of Persian. Evidence of its former rank in the region can still be seen by the extent of its influence on Urdu, Hindi, Bengali, and Sindhi language, as well as the popularity that Persian literature still enjoys in the region.

Classification

Persian belongs to the Western group of the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European language family, and is of the Subject Object Verb type. 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.

Local names

Green denotes official language status; orange denotes minority language.

Persian language is locally known as

• Template:Rtl-lang (transliteration: [Fârsi] Error: {{Lang}}: text has italic markup (help)) or Template:Rtl-lang ([Pârsi] Error: {{Lang}}: text has italic markup (help)), local name in Iran, Afghanistan (where it is officially known as Dari) 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.

Nomenclature

Persian, the more widely used name of the language in English, is an Anglicized form derived from Latin *[Persianus] Error: {{Lang}}: text has italic markup (help) < Latin [Persia] Error: {{Lang}}: text has italic markup (help) < Greek [Πέρσις Pérsis] Error: {{Lang}}: text has italic markup (help), a hellenized form of Old Persian [Parsa] Error: {{Lang}}: text has italic markup (help). 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". 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. 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."

The Academy of Persian Language and Literature has argued in an official pronouncement 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, and is even preferred by some.

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) . 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.

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" . 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.

Dialects and close languages

Main article: Persian dialects and varieties

File:Moderniranianlanguagesmap.jpg

The region where Persian (green) and other Iranian languages are spoken.

Communication is generally mutually intelligible between Iranians, Tajiks, and Persian-speaking Afghans; however, by popular definition:

• Iranian Persian is the variety of Persian spoken in Iran.
• Dari is the local name for the eastern dialect of Persian, one of the two official languages of Afghanistan, including Hazaragi — spoken by the Hazara people of central Afghanistan.
• Tajik could also be considered an eastern dialect of Persian, but, unlike Iranian and Afghan Persian, it is written in the Cyrillic script.

Ethnologue offers another classification for dialects of Persian language. According to this source, dialects of this language include the following:

• Western Persian, or Irani (in Iran)
• Eastern Persian (in Afghanistan)
• Tajik (in Tajikistan)
• Hazaragi (in Afghanistan)
• Aimaq (in Afghanistan)
• Bukharic (in Israel, Uzbekistan)
• Dehwari (in Pakistan)
• Darwazi (in Afghanistan)
• Dzhidi (in Israel)
• 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 Juder-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 article: Persian phonology

Iranian Persian has six vowels and twenty-three consonants, including two affricates /ʧ/ (ch) and /ʤ/ (j).

Vowels

The vowel phonemes of Persian

Historically, Persian distinguished length: the long vowels /iː/, /uː/, /ɒː/ contrasting with the short vowels /e/, /o/, /æ/ respectively. Modern spoken Persian, however, generally does not make this distinction any more . Persian dialects and varieties differ in their vowels, more so than in their consonants.

Consonants

Consonants

	labial	apico-dentals	post-alveolars	velars	glottals
voiceless stops	p	t		k	ʔ
voiced stops	b	d		g
voiceless fricatives	f	s	ʃ	x	h
voiced fricatives	v	z	ʒ	ɣ
nasals	m	n
liquids		l, r
glides			j
voiceless affricates			ʧ
voiced affricates			ʤ

Grammar

Main article: Persian grammar

Morphology

Persian morphology is affixal, consisting of a few prefixes and mostly suffixes. Suffixes predominate Persian morphology, though there are a small number of prefixes. Verbs can express tense and aspect, and they agree with the subject in person and number. 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 be comprised of optional subjects, prepositional phrases, and objects, followed by a required verb. If the object is specific, then the object is followed by the word rɑ: and precedes prepositional phrases: “(S) (O + “rɑ:”) (PP) V”.

Vocabulary

Main article: Persian vocabulary

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 . Several languages of southwest Asia have also been influenced, including Armenian and Georgian. 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

Dehkhoda's personal handwriting; a typical cursive Persian script.

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 internationalization reasons. Tajik, which is considered by some linguists to be a Persian dialect influenced by Russian and the Turkic languages of Central Asia, is written with the Cyrillic alphabet in Tajikistan (see Tajik alphabet).

Persian alphabet

Main article: 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. Since the short vowels are not inscribed, the word krm, for instance, can be pronounced with various vowel combinations resulting in five possible lexical elements. A reader uses the context to determine the word in the sentence.

kerm "worm", karam "generosity", kerem "cream", krom "chrome" and karm "vine".

Additions

The Persian alphabet adds four letters to the Arabic alphabet:

Sound	Isolated form	Unicode name
[p]	پ	Peh
[tʃ] (ch)	چ	Cheh
[ʒ] (zh)	ژ	Jeh
[g]	گ	Gaf

Variations

The Persian alphabet also modifies some letters from the Arabic alphabet. For example, alef with hamza below ( إ ) changes to alef ( ا ); teh marbuta ( ة ) usually, but not always, changes to heh ( ه ) or teh ( ت ); and words using various hamzas get spelled with yet another kind of hamza (so that مسؤول becomes مسئول).

The letters different in shape are:

Sound	original Arabic letter	modified Persian letter	name
[k]	ك	ک	Kaf
[j] (y) and [iː], or rarely [ɑː]	ي or ى	ی	Yeh

The vocalization marks used in the Arabic script, or harakat, are also used in Persian, although some of them have different pronunciations. For example, an Arabic damma is pronounced /u/, while in Persian it is pronounced /o/.

Latin alphabet

UniPers, short for the Universal Persian Alphabet (Pârsiye Jahâni) is a Latin-based alphabet created over 50 years ago in Iran and popularized by Mohamed Keyvan, who used it in a number of Persian textbooks for foreigners and travellers. The International Persian Alphabet (Pársik) is another Latin-based alphabet developed in recent years mainly by A. Moslehi, a comparative linguist.

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.

Fingilish, 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.

Tajik alphabet

Main article: Tajik alphabet

Text detail from the reverse of the former Tajik 1 ruble note.

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 article: 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.

The known history of the Persian language can be divided into the following three distinct periods:

Old Persian

Old Persian supposedly evolved from Proto-Indo-Iranian on the western wing in the Iranian plateau. The first known written evidence of Persian appears with the rise of the Persian Empire under Cyrus the Great of the Achaemenid dynasty in 550 BC. Old Persian was the main official language of the Persian Empire at the time of the Achaemenids and with their rise, its domain extended to Lybia to the west, present-day Ukraine to the north, the Indus river to the east and Yemen to the south, to be used as a lingua franca for over 200 years. The majority of inscriptions in Old Persian were found in Iran, Egypt and present-day Turkey. During this period, Persian was influenced by Aramaic, Elamite, Babylonian, Akkadian, Greek, Sanskrit, Hebrew, Lydian etc.. Persian also influenced many languages of its era, especially Hebrew and Sanskrit. Under the Achaemenid Empire, Persian was written in cuneiform with its own distinct script. The Old Persian period ends with the fall of the Achaemenid dynasty.

Parthian and Middle Persian (Pahlavi)

Middle Persian can be divided into several periods within two remarkably different eras; the Persian used at the time of the Parthian Empire (248 BCE–224 CE) and the Persian of the Sassanid Empire (224–651 CE). Middle Persian is often referred to as Pahlavi which was written in the script of the same name. Over this period, the morphology of the language was simplified from the complex conjugation and declension system of Old Persian to the almost completely regularized morphology and rigid syntax of Middle Persian.

Pahlavi coexisted with several other Iranian languages spoken throughout the Iranian plateau, Central Asia and the Indian sub-continent. These languages included Avestan, Sogdian, Bactrian, Khwarezmian, Saka, and Old Ossetic (Scytho-Sarmatian). Middle Persian influenced Arabic, Latin, Hindi, Armenian, Georgian, and other languages. Much of the literature in Middle Persian was lost in the aftermath of the Arab invasion.

New 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 it came to be known as one of the most romantic languages of all times. Persian 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, inlcuding 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 and then from Turkish.

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	Romanization	Gloss
تمام افراد بشر آزاد به دنیا می‌آیند و از لحاظ حیثیت و حقوق با هم برابرند, همه دارای عقل و وجدان می‌باشند و باید نسبت به یک دیگر با روح برادری رفتار کنند.	Tamāme afrāde bashar āzād be donyā miyāyand va az lehāze heisiyat o hoquq bā ham barābarand. Hame dārāye aql o vejdān mibāshand va bāyad nesbat be yekdigar bā ruhe barābari raftār 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
• Common phrases in Persian
• List of Persian poets and authors
• Persianate
• Persian literature
• Persian mythology

Further reading

1. Template:Harvard reference.
2. Template:Harvard reference.
3. Template:Harvard reference.

External links

• AriaDic Persian / English Dictionary with pronunciation
• UCLA Language Materials Project: Persian
• CAIS Iranian Languages & Literatures
• Academic Grammar of New Persian in Persian, English and German
• New Persian