Language in Iran | Globerove Globerove > Iran > Language in Iran Language in Iran By Globerover on March 29, 2010 in Iran , Languages What language is spoken in Iran? It is Persian, Farsi or Iranian? This article looks at language in Iran. Iranian languages form a major subgroup of the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European Language family. It is interesting to note however, that Iranian languages are not limited to Iran – they are diverse in nature and are spoken by over 70 million people across southern and south western Asia. The reason why they are called Iranian languages is that they have been spoken across the Iranian plateau for thousands of years. The majority of modern Iranian languages have been adapted from the Arabic script. Many people are confused about whether to term the Iranian language ‘Persian’ or ‘Farsi’ which is due to linguistic changes which have taken place over the years. However, the Iranian language has been referred to as Persian for centuries and is the official name of Iran to describe the language spoken there. The name ‘Persian’ evolves from the name of the language spoken by a nomadic group of people in southern Iran known as the ‘Parsa’.

The Parsa lived in the southern Iranian region of Persis. The term ‘Persian’ also describes the languages spoken by Afghanistan and Tajikistan. The term ‘Farsi’ has evolved from the Arabized form of ‘Parsi’. There is no ‘p’ sound in Arabic, hence the change of this initial sound to an ‘f’. Although most individuals in Iran now refer to their language as Farsi and not as Persian, some individuals argue that this is an inaccurate use of the word, inappropriate and ignores the cultural heritage of the Iranian language and excludes Afghanistan and Tajikistan. The second most widely spoken Iranian language after Persian is Kurdish. Kurdish script is based on the Perso-Arabic script and the Latin alphabet. There are also many ‘new’ Iranian languages which have emerged over time. They are spoken by people living across the Iranian plateau but unfortunately many are now diminishing due to more dominant surrounding languages. The following two cases give an example of the new Iranian languages: Pashtu is a fairly new Iranian language which is spoken by individuals living in southern Afghanistan and northern Pakistan. As with the Kurdish language it is primarily written in the Perso-Arabic script, although it has additions from Urdu as opposed to the Latin alphabet.

Baluchi is spoken primarily within south eastern Iran and Western Pakistan. Again, it is written in the Perso-Arabic script but there is no established written tradition of this language. Iran - The Persian Language The Persian Language Iran Table of Contents The official language of Iran is Persian (the Persian term for which is Farsi). It is the language of government and public instruction and is the mother tongue of half of the population. Persian is spoken as a second language by a large proportion of the rest. Many different dialects of Persian are spoken in various parts of the Central Plateau, and people from each city can usually be identified by their speech. Some dialects, such as Gilaki and Mazandari, are distinct enough to be virtually unintelligible to a Persian speaker from Tehran or Shiraz. Persian is an ancient language that has developed through three historical stages. Old Persian dates back to at least 514 B.C. and was used until about A.D. 250. It was written in cuneiform and used exclusively for royal proclamations and announcements. Middle Persian, also known as Pahlavi, was in use from about A.D. 250 to 900.

It was the official language of the Sassanid Empire and of the Zoroastrian priesthood. It was written in an ideographic script called Huzvaresh. Modern Persian is a continually evolving language that began to develop about A.D. 900. Following the Arab conquest of the Sassanid Empire in the seventh century and the gradual conversion of the population to Islam, Arabic became the official, literary, and written language, but Persian remained the language of court records. Persian, however, borrowed heavily from Arabic to enrich its own vocabulary and eventually adopted the Arabic script. In subsequent centuries, many Turkic words also were incorporated into Persian. As part of the Indo-European family of languages, Persian is distantly related to Latin, Greek, the Slavic and Teutonic languages, and English. This relationship can be seen in such cognates as beradar (brother), pedar (father), and mader (mother). It is a relatively easy language for English-speaking people to learn compared with any other major language of the Middle East. Verbs tend to be regular, nouns lack gender and case distinction, prepositions are much used, noun plural formation tends to be regular, and word order is important.

The difficulty of the language lies in the subtlety and variety of word meanings according to context. Persian is written right to left in the Arabic script with several modifications. It has four more consonants than Arabic-- pe, che, zhe, and gaf--making a total of thirty-two letters. Most of the letters have four forms in writing, depending on whether they occur at the beginning, in the middle, or at the end of a word or whether they stand separately. The letters stand for the consonants and the three long vowels; special marks written above or below the line are used to denote short vowels. These signs are used only in dictionaries and textbooks, so that a reader must have a substantial vocabulary to understand a newspaper, an average book, or handwriting. Persian is the most important of a group of several related languages that linguists classify as Indo-Iranian. Persian speakers regard their language as extremely beautiful, and they take great pleasure in listening to the verses of medieval poets such as Ferdowsi, Hafez, and Sadi. The language is a living link with the past and has been important in binding the nation together.

There is no accepted standard transliteration of Persian into Latin letters, and Iranians write their names for Western use in a variety of ways, often following French spelling. Among scholars and librarians a profound dispute exists between those who think Persian should be transliterated in conformity with the rules for Arabic and those who insist that Persian should have its own rules because it does not use all of the same sounds as Arabic. Among educated Persians, there have been sporadic efforts as far back as the tenth century to diminish the use of Arabic loanwords in their language. Both Pahlavi shahs supported such efforts in the twentieth century. During the reign of Reza Shah Pahlavi (1925-41), serious consideration was given to the possibility of Romanizing the writing of Persian as had been done with Turkish, but these plans were abandoned. Since the Revolution, a contrary tendency to increase the use of Arabic words in both spoken and written Persian has emerged among government leaders. The Persian-speaking People The Persians constitute the largest ethnic component in Iran.

They predominate in the major urban areas of central and eastern Iran--in the cities of Tehran, Esfahan, Mashhad, Shiraz, Arak, Kashan, Kerman, Qom, and Yazd--and in the villages of the Central Plateau. An estimated 50 to 60 percent of the population speaks Persian as a first language. In music, poetry, and art the Persians consider themselves--and are generally considered by other groups--as the leaders of the country. This feeling is strengthened by a consciousness of a heroic past and a rich literary heritage. Both before the Revolution and since, Persians have filled the majority of government positions. The vast majority of Persians are Shia Muslims. The Shia religion serves as a source of unity among Persians and other Iranian Shias. Since at least the beginning of the nineteenth century, Persians have dominated the higher ranks of the Shia clergy and have provided important clerical revolutionary leaders such as ayatollahs Khomeini and Hosain Ali Montazeri. Fewer than 500,000 Persians are followers of other faiths. These include Bahais, Jews, or members of the pre-Islamic Zoroastrian faith.

Custom Search Farsi, the most widely spoken Persian Language, a Farsi Dictionary, Farsi English Dictionary, The spoken language in Iran, History of Farsi Language, Learn Farsi, Farsi Translation Tweet Persian Language, also known as Farsi, is the most widely spoken member of the Iranian branch of the Indo-Iranian languages, a subfamily of the Indo-European languages. It is the language of Iran (formerly Persia) and is also widely spoken in Afghanistan and, in an archaic form, in Tajikistan and the Pamir Mountain region. Persian is spoken today primarily in Iran and Afghanistan, but was historically a more widely understood language in an area ranging from the Middle East to India. Significant populations of speakers in other Persian Gulf countries (Bahrain, Iraq, Oman, People's Democratic Republic of Yemen, and the United Arab Emirates), as well as large communities in the USA. Total numbers of speakers is high: over 40 million Farsi speakers (about 60% of Iran's population); over 14 million Dari Persian speakers in Afghanistan (50% of the population according to CIA World FactBook & Britannica); and about 2 million Dari Persian speakers in Pakistan.

In Afghanistan Farsi is spoken almost everywhere and over 50% of Afghanistan's total population speak Farsi or Dari. The map on the right should cover Herat and the nothern parts of Afghanistan where the majority of people speak Farsi. - Thank you, Laila Ahmadi Three phases may be distinguished in the development of Iranian languages: Old, Middle, and Modern. Old Iranian is represented by Avestan and Old Persian. Avestan, probably spoken in the northeast of ancient Persia, is the language of the Avesta, the sacred scriptures of Zoroastrianism. Except for this scriptural use, Avestan died out centuries before the advent of Islam. Old Persian is recorded in the southwest in cuneiform inscriptions of the Persian kings of the Achaemenid dynasty (circa 550-330 BC), notably Darius I and Xerxes I. Old Persian and Avestan have close affinity with Sanskrit, and, like Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin, are highly inflected languages.

When "Persia" became "Iran" This article is a part of "Persia or Iran" by Professor Ehsan Yarshater, published in Iranian Studies, Vol. XXII, No.1, 1989. In 1935 the Iranian government requested those countries which it had diplomatic relations with, to call Persia "Iran," which is the name of the country in Persian. The suggestion for the change is said to have come from the Iranian ambassador to Germany, who came under the influence of the Nazis. At the time Germany was in the grip of racial fever and cultivated good relations with nations of "Aryan" blood.

It is said that some German friends of the ambassador persuaded him that, as with the advent of Reza Shah, Persia had turned a new leaf in its history and had freed itself from the pernicious influences of Britain and Russia, whose interventions in Persian affairs had practically crippled the country under the Qajars, it was only fitting that the country be called by its own name, "Iran." This would not only signal a new beginning and bring home to the world the new era in Iranian history, but would also signify the Aryan race of its population, as "Iran" is a cognate of "Aryan" and derived from it. The Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs sent out a circular to all foreign embassies in Tehran, requesting that the country thenceforth be called "Iran." Diplomatic courtesy obliged, and by and by the name "Iran" began to appear in official correspondence and news items. At first "Iran" sounded alien (for non-Iranians), and many failed to recognize its connection with Persia.

Some (Westerners) thought that it was perhaps one of the new countries like Iraq and Jordan carved out of the ruins of the Ottoman Empire, or a country in Africa or Southeast Asia that had just been granted independence; and not a few confused it with Iraq, itself a recent entity. As time passed and as a number of events, like the Allied invasion of Iran in 1941 and the nationalization of the oil industry under Prime Minster Dr Mohammad Mosaddeq, put the country in the headlines, the name "Iran" became generally accepted, and "Persia" fell into comparative disuse, though more slowly in Britain than in the United States. Click on the Iran Linguistic Composition map for a larger image Online Text Translator Iran / Languages - LookLex Encyclopaedia The official language of Iran is only one: Persian . Seven more languages are recognized regional languages: Azerbaijani , Kurdish , Lori , Mazandarani , Gilaki , Balochi and Arabic . The map of languages spoken in Iran is as complex and confusing as is the case with ethnic groups. Ethnologue lists as many as 66 languages, of which 31 has more than 20,000 speakers.

Sizeable languages, with more than 1 million, count as many as 12. The largest language is Persian, which although the language of the state, is the daily language of less than 50% of the population. Although the high number of languages within one state's borders, there is a limited number of language groups: Iranian , Turkic , Semitic plus Domari . Many of the languages within each group are intelligible to one another. There is also important influences from other language groups, like Mongolian. Estimates for languages in Iran are highly uncertain, differing greatly between different sources. The figures given here are rough estimates, calculated upon relative sizes from other sources compared to the total number of inhabitants in Iran. As an illustration, some sources indicate that the total speakers of a first language in Iran is up to 20% higher than the actual number of inhabitants. Iranian Iranian languages dominate the central heartland of Iran. The different languages usually form majority communities in certain regions. The names for region, people, and language are often practically the same. Non-Persians are often fluent in Persian , being the language of the state.

The exception here is Kurdish speakers, that form communities so large that even trade and education need not cross the border of their own language. Most of the Iranian dialects are sometimes classified as merely dialects of Persian. Turkic Turkic languages dominate strongly in the northwest, where Iran borders to Iran and Azerbaijan. But Turkics live in pockets around Iran, also in the northeast as well as in the Zagros mountains in the southwest. One very interesting aspect, is that Turkish is not listed among the languages of Iran. Semitic Arabic is the only notable Semitic language of Iran, forming majority communities in the west and southwest, bordering Iraq. Arabic speakers also form tiny pockets of majority communities far away. Domari Domari speakers form no majority anywhere, rather they represent large minorities in several cities and towns. Also they are also not represented at all in many cities. Their main regions are Kurbat and Luli in west; Mehtar in Fars and Kohgiluyeh va Boyerahmad Province; Karachi in north. Their Iranian dialects may be very different from one another. Many Domari have good conduct in the dominant language of their region, counting Persian ; Lori ; and Qashqai .

Armenian In a very small region in the northwest, Armenian speakers have substantial communities, but most Armenians make up quarters in the large cities. Lost languages With its attested languages, Iran is already a highly diverse country. But there are several more languages for which sources and descriptions disagree upon. In short, some languages are defined by some scholars, while other consider these to be merely dialects of another language. In several cases, and then for small languages, no research has been done in many years, sometimes even several decades. These languages may very well have disappeared by now. From Ethnologue, these are the languages with more than 1,000 speakers that LookLex find insufficient attested to be included here: Parsi-Dari is listed with 350,000 speakers, all to be Zoroastrians. But this religion has in Iran only 60,000. There is, however, another language, the Dari-Zoroastrian , which had 11,500 speakers in 1999. It appears that these two are the same, but that the latter is the only correctly updated.

Bashkardi , Natanzi , Nayini , Sivandi , Soi and Gazi all listed with 7,030 speakers in 2000. It appears that very little data from an older research have survived a little bit too well. Northwestern Fars and Southwestern Fars both also have the same number of speakers, 7,500 in 2006. History of Persian or Parsi Language History of Persian or Parsi Language By: Fariborz Rahnamoon ORIGIN Parsi or Persian was the language of the Parsa people who ruled Iran between 550 - 330 BCE. It belongs to what scholars call the Indo-Iranian group of languages. It became the language of the Persian Empire and was widely spoken in the ancient days ranging from the borders of India in the east, Russian in the north, the southern shores of the Persian Gulf to Egypt and the Mediterranean in the west. Over the centuries Parsi has changed to its modern form and today Persian is spoken primarily in Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan and parts of Uzbekistan.

It was the language of the court of many of the Indian kings till the British banned its use, after occupying India in the 18 century. The Mogul kings of India had made Persian their court language. Engraved and filled with gold on walls of Delhi's Red Fort is the sentence "Agar Ferdows dar jahan ast hamin ast o hamin ast o hamin ast"; - 'If there is a paradise on earth it is here it is here it is here.' Although the name of the language has been maintained as Persian or Parsi or its Arabic form Farsi (because in Arabic they do not have the letter P) the language has undergone great changes and can be categorized into the following groups. Old Persian Classical Persian Modern Persian Old Persian is what the original Parsa tribe of the Hakahmaneshinian ( Achaemenid ) era spoke and they have left for us samples carved on stone in cuneiform script. Middle Persian is the language spoken during the Sasanian era also known as Pahlavi.

We have plenty of writings from that era in the form of religious writings of the Zarathushti religion, namely the Bundahish, Arda Viraf nameh, Mainu Khared, Pandnameh Adorbad Mehresfand etc. Classical Persian the origin of this language is not very clear. Words have their roots in different languages spoken in various parts of the country but the majority of the words have their roots in Old Persian, Pahlavi and Avesta. They are represented in classical writings and poems. Ferdowsi claims to have gone through great pains for a period of thirty years to preserve this language, which was under pressure from the Arab invaders, and was on the verge of being lost. It is noteworthy that every country that the Arabs conquered lost its civilization, culture and language and adopted the Arabic language and way of life. For example Egypt whose people could build Pyramids, were good astronomers and possessed the art of mummification lost their culture and language to the Arabs and started living like them. It was only Iran that broke the trend and stood against the Arabs and preserved its culture and language and even adopted their own version of Islam by creating Shiaism.

Later when the Moguls invaded Iran the Iranians converted them into ambassadors of Iranian language, culture and art. The Moguls made Parsi their court language in India. Modern Persian language or Farsi (Arabic pronunciation of Parsi) as spoken today consists of a lot of words of non-Iranian origin. Some modern technical terms, understandably, have been incorporated from English, French and German and are recognizable, but Arabic has corrupted a major part of the language by replacing original Parsi words. What Ferdowsi worked so hard to preserve is finally being lost. The European words have usually come into use because there was no existing Persian word to describe the situation or product. Instead of coining a word the foreign word was imported with the product. For example with the imported car came the French form of its name 'Automobile'. It took some time and effort and support from the government to coin a Parsi word 'Khodrow' and replace the foreign word. Another example is the word 'Television', which has a less successful replacement 'Sadah va Seema', so also is the word 'Radio'.

There are some non-technical words like 'Merci' (Thanks) that has settled into the Farsi language and many Iranians do not consider it as foreign, and the Parsi word 'Tashakor' is alternatively used in speaking but in writing it more often replaces 'Merci'. Another example is the word "Salaam" which has been borrowed from the Arabs and is used by Iranians as a salute when two friends meet each other, instead of the Parsi salute "Rouz-e-gar Neek" and "Dorood". In Arabic "Salaam" means Peace but no Iranian is aware of its meaning or origin. The Arabs who lived as a tribe were always at war with each other; they always had their sword ready by their side. When they came close enough to each other they had to call out "Salaam" meaning I come in peace otherwise he was considered an enemy who had to be killed. Not replying to a Salaam, even among the Iranians who do not know that the word means peace, is considered as a sign of enmity. These are example of some very common words.

The corruption by Arabic words has done great damage to the Parsi language because it has not only replaced original Parsi words but also driven them out of the language, to the extend that reintroduction of these original Parsi words sound alien to many readers. The damage has been so extensive that Arabic words have even found their way into the latter editions of 'Khordeh Avesta' the prayer book of the Zarathushties, which one expects to be in Avesta language. Parsi-e Tajik & Parsi-e Dari The people of Tajikistan and Afghanistan have maintained a somewhat purer form of the Parsi language and call it Parsi-e Tajik in Tajikistan and Parsi-e Dari in Afghanistan. Dari The Dari language spoken by the Zarathushties of Yazd and Kerman has nothing in common with the Dari of Afghanistan. In fact the Zarathushti Dari is not understood by Farsi speaking people and is a language that has no script and has not been written. Children learn it as a mother tongue and it has been preserved in this fashion for centuries.

The Zarathushties of Kerman born after 1940's do not speak Dari, because their parents, who thought that by speaking Dari their children would develop a Farsi accent unique to Dari speakers and thus be recognized as Zarathushti in school and thus be harassed by the Muslims, did not teach them Dari. Fortunately the Zarathushties of Yazd have maintained a strong link with this language and every child learns and speaks this language. Other Iranian Languages Other than Farsi there are many other Iranian languages spoken within Greater Iran, such as Sogdi, Kharazmi, Pashtu, Urdu, Baluchi, Kurdi and Dari to name a few. Urdu Urdu means camp and Urdu language was the language of the camp. When Nader Shah invaded India he set up his camp in modern day Pakistan, here the Hindi speaking Indian and the Parsi speaking Iranians mingled together and a third language Urdu was born. It is bridge between the two branches of Indo Iranian languages. Today Urdu like Farsi has a lot of Arabic words in it.

SCRIPT The Iranian culture was based on the teachings of Zarathushtra, who preached the use of wisdom, as such the general population made use of their brain to a greater extend than may be done even today. For that very reason they had no need for a script. They made good use of their mind -Vohumana- and memorized information acquired through the ear and this was a handy method. They only had to refer to their memory and not to the voluminous scrolls. 'We revere the wisdom acquired through the ear'. [Haptan Yasht 6. Yashts in Roman Script with Translations By T R Sethna] [Even to this day the Zoroastrian Mobeds in India memorize the whole Avesta, which runs into volumes as part of their training to become Mobeds and as for a living example of a language without script, the Zarathushties of Iran have been speaking the Dari language for centuries without writing it.] After the Persian came to power and with the expansion of the Empire and the inclusion within their realm, of various cultures that used writing to communicate, the need for communication by writing arose.

The scribes of Elam and Babylon were recruited and for the first time the language of the Persians were written in the Cuneiform script . Had they had their own script we would have some proof of it by way of archeological evidence. Using their mind and using it in a good way -VohuMana- was their principle in life. This fact has been recognized even in the Bible by always calling the Persian 'Wise'. Even the act of predicting the time and location of the birth of Jesus Christ is not considered a prophecy but an act of wisdom. So when the Iranians entered the business of writing they used their wisdom and started improving on existing methods and forms of writing. Initially they used the clay tablets, as was the practice among the scribes, like the ones found at Sush (Susa), which contains the Old Persian text of the foundation charter of the palace of Dariush ( Darius ). Although the scribes were using cuneiform script for centuries it, never occurred to them before, and it was under the Iranians that it was developed into an alphabet denoting sound. Thus the second generation of Old Persian was written in forty-three signs or alphabet and writing became easy and less tedious.

The Assyrian scribes used the Aramaic script . An Assyrian bas-relief shows two scribes, one of whom holds a tablet and stylus for writing in cuneiform and the other a papyrus for writing Aramaic in Ink. The Aramaic script written with ink on papyrus and skin was, gradually adopted by the Iranians. A few records in the Armanic script have been found to prove its use from Egypt to India. One of the versions, on the tomb of Dariush is drawn up in the Old Persian and written in the Armanic script. The use of Papyrus, skin and ink made writing, storing and transportation of written material more practical, compared to the wet clay on which the cuneiform script was to be written and then dried. The extent of the Empire, the need for messages and records of trade and commerce to be taken from one place to another, all this weighed in favour of the Armanic script on papyrus or skin. At the same time this itself was the very cause of the loss of information, today the eclipse in information on the great Empire was caused by the destructibility of papyrus and skin.

We know from the Bible that records were well maintained by the Iranians in those days. (Ezra 6: 1-3) 'Then Darius the king made a decree, and search was made in the house of the rolls, where the treasure were laid up in Babylon. And there was found in Achmetha (Hamadan) in the palace that is in the province of the Medes, a roll, and therein was a record thus written. In the first year of Cyrus the king .........' All this information and all the knowledge and science (Asha Vahista) of the Zarathushties, which was recorded, was destroyed by Alexander in his barbaric ways, but that which was saved found its way into Greece where some of it was misused, personified and attributed to the pagan gods. But most of it was translated and called Greek Medicine, Greek science, Greek philosophy, Greek mathematics, and overall it caused a growth of knowledge and progress among the Greeks. During the Sassanian era, a very advanced form of alphabet was used, what is today known as the "Din Dabereh". It has 48 alphabets consisting of 14 vowels and 34 consonants.

This alphabet is capable of recording all types of sound and therefore every language. After the Arab conquest, they forced their inferior script on the people of Iran, in fact it was the Iranians who for the first time organized and wrote the grammar for the Arabic language and made it useable. Although the Arabic script was not capable of recording the sounds of Parsi language even after addition of additional alphabets not found in Arabic such as PH - CHA - JAH - GH; it became the official script for writing Parsi. Today the Arabic script is used by the Iranians to write Persian and even Avesta. The Din Dabereh script has been forgotten but exists. The Tajik use the Russian script and by adding a couple of additional alphabets they are able to create Parsi sounds much better than what is done with the Arabic script. Hopefully one day Greater Iran will unite and revive its ancient script, culture and way of life. Language Spoken in Iran | IranianConsulate.com Home » Iranian Economy and Culture » Language Spoken in Iran Language Spoken in Iran Posted date: November 27, 2012 | No comment This column is sponsored by EmploymentCrossing , America's leading job site dedicated to getting jobs for professionals.

What language is spoken in Iran? Is it Persian, Iranian or Farsi? This article is a result of studying the tourism in Iran and reckons at the languages spoken in Iran. Iranian languages build a major subgroup of the Indo-Iranian division of the family of Indo-European Language. Nonetheless, it is remarkable to note that Iranian languages are not limited simply to Iran– they are varied and different in nature and are spoken by more than 70 million people across southern and south western region in Asia. The ground for them being called Iranian languages is that these languages have been spoken across the Iranian plateau for more than thousands of years. The majority of modern languages of Iran have been adapted from the Arabic script. Several people remain confused how to term the Iranian language — ‘Persian’ or ‘Farsi’ — owing to the linguistic alterations that have taken place over the years. The Iranian language however has been referred to as ‘Persian’ for many centuries and is termed as the official name of Iran to depict the language spoken there. The term ‘Persian’ has evolved from the name of the language that was spoken by a nomadic group of people in southern region of Iran known as ‘Parsa’.

The Parsa people lived in southern Iranian region of Persis. The terminology ‘Persian’ also connotes to the languages spoken by Afghanistan and Tajikistan. The terminology ‘Farsi’ has developed from the Arabic form of ‘Parsi’. There is no sound of ‘p’ in Arabic, and that’s why the change of this initial sound to ‘f’ took place. Even though most people in Iran now refer to ‘Farsi’ as their language and not to ‘Persian’, some people argue that this is an erroneous use of the word, unsuitable and that it disregards the cultural heritage of the Iranian language and do not include Afghanistan and Tajikistan. Kurdish is the second most widely spoken Iranian language after Persian. The script of Kurdish is based on the script of Perso-Arabic and the Latin alphabet. There are also several other new Iranian languages that have emerged over time as tourism in Iran increased. They are spoken by individuals dwelling across the Iranian plateau, but sadly many of them are now diminishing owing to more dominant surrounding languages. The following two cases provide a good example of the new Iranian languages: Pashtu is a comparatively new Iranian language and is spoken by people living in northern Pakistan and southern Afghanistan.

Just like with the Kurdish language, Pashtu is primarily written in the Perso-Arabic script, though it has additions from Urdu language as opposed to the Latin alphabet. Baluchi is spoken mostly within Western Pakistan and south eastern Iran. Again, Baluchi is written in the Perso-Arabic script but there is no recognized written tradition of this language. Persian Language Persian Language History and Origins of Persian (Parsi or Farsi) and Dari-Persian language By: UCLA, Language Materials Projects Persian is spoken today primarily in Iran, Afghanistan and Tajikistan, but was historically a more widely understood language in an area ranging from the Middle East to India. Significant populations of speakers in other Persian Gulf countries (Bahrain, Iraq, Oman, Republic of Yemen and the United Arab Emirates), as well as large communities around the World. Total numbers of speakers is high: about 55% of Iran's population are Persian speakers; about 65% of Tajikistan's population are Tajik-Persian speakers: over 25% of the Afghanistan's population are Dari-Persian speakers; and about 1% of the population of Pakistan are Dari-Persian speakers as well.

Linguistic Affiliation Persian is a subgroup of West Iranian languages that include the closely related Persian languages of Dari and Tajik; the less closely related languages of Luri, Bakhtiari and Kumzari; and the non-Persian dialects of Fars Province. Other more distantly related languages of this group include Kurdish, spoken in Turkey, Iraq, and Iran; and Baluchi, spoken in Afghanistan, Iran, and Pakistan. Even more distantly related are languages of the East Iranian group, which includes Pashtu, spoken in Afghanistan; Ossete, spoken in North Ossetian, South Ossetian, and Caucusus of former USSR; and Yaghnobi, spoken in Tajikistan. Other Iranian languages of note are Old Persian and Avestan (the sacred language of the Zoroastrians for which texts exist from the 6th century B.C.). West and East Iranian comprise the Iranian group of the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Indo-Iranian languages are spoken in a wide area stretching from portions of eastern Turkey and eastern Iraq to western India.

The other main division of Indo-Iranian, in addition to Iranian, is the Indo-Aryan languages, a group comprised of many languages of the Indian subcontinent, for example, Sanskrit, Hindi/Urdu, Bengali, Gujerati, Punjabi, and Sindhi. Linguistic Variation Scholars recognize three major dialect divisions of Persian: Farsi, or the Persian of Iran, Dari Persian of Afghanistan, and Tajik, a variant spoken in Tajikistan in Central Asia. We treat Tajik as a separate language, however. Farsi and Dari have further dialectal variants, some with names that coincide with provincial names. All are more or less mutually intelligible. Dari Persian, mainly spoken in Afghanistan, until recently, deferred to the Tehran standard as its model, and although there are clear phonological and morphological contrasts, due partly to the influence of neighbouring Turkic languages, Farsi and Dari Persian remain quite similar. The dialectal variation between Farsi and Dari has been described as analogous to that between European French and Canadian French. Dari is more conservative in maintaining vowel distinctions that have been lost in Farsi.

Luri and Bakhtiari, languages in the southwest part of Iran, are most closely related Farsi, but these are difficult for a speaker of the Tehran standard to understand. While speakers of Luri regard their speech as a dialect of Persian, speakers of Farsi do not agree. Judaic Persian, written in Hebrew characters and used by Jews throughout Iran, is close to the Persian standard in its written form. However, many Iranians of Jewish descent have left the country and no longer form a significant portion of the population. Orthography Persian in Iran and Afghanistan is written in a variety of the Arabic script called Perso-Arabic, which has some innovations to account for Persian phonological differences. This script came into use in Persia after the Islamic conquest in the seventh century. A variety of script forms: Nishki is a print type based closely on Arabic; Talik is a cultivated manuscript, with certain letters having reduced forms and others occasionally elongated in order to produce lines of equal length; and Shekesteh is also a manuscript, allowing for a greater variation of form and exhibiting extreme reduction of some letters. See Persian Alphabet Linguistic Sketch The richly inflected morphological system of Old Iranian has been drastically reduced in Persian.

The language has no grammatical gender or articles, but person and number distinctions are maintained. Nouns are marked for specificity: there is one marker in the singular and two in the plural. Objects of transitive verbs are marked by a suffix. The morphological features of Arabic words are preserved in loans, thus Persian shows "broken" plural formations, that is, a word may have two different plural forms. Verbs are formed using one of two basic stems, present and past; aspect is as important as tense: all verbs are marked as perfective and imperfective. The latter is marked by means of prefixation. Both perfective and imperfective verb forms appear in three tenses: present, past and inferential past. The language has an aorist (a type of past tense), and has three moods: indicative, subjunctive, counterfactual. Passive is formed with the verb 'to become', and is not allowed with specified agents. Verbs agree with the subject in person and number. Persian verbs are normally compounds consisting of a noun and a verb. Word order in Persian is Subject-Object-Verb although modifiers follow the nouns they modify and the language has prepositions. Persian distinguishes short and long vowels.

Words are stressed on the last syllable. Role in Society Persian, until recent centuries, was culturally and historically one of the most prominent languages of the Middle East and regions beyond. For example, it was an important language during the reign of the Moguls in Indian where knowledge of Persian was cultivated and encouraged; its use in the courts of Mogul India ended in 1837, banned by officials of the East Indian Company (British Colonialism). Persian scholars were prominent in both Turkish and Indian courts during the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries in composing dictionaries and grammatical works. A Persian Indian vernacular developed and many colonial British officers learned their Persian from Indian scribes. Persian is the first language of about 55 percent of the population in Iran, and is the country's official language. It is the language of government, the media, and school instruction. Of the rest of Iran's population, 20 percent speak related Western Iranian languages and 25 percent speak Arabic, New Aramaic, Armenian, Georgian, Romany, and Turkic languages. In Afghanistan, Dari Persian, along with Pashtu, are official languages of the country.

The language is taught in schools and radio Afghanistan is promoting a standardized pronunciation of the literary language. The Persian spoken in Teheran serves as a model for more formal styles, but some colloquial styles are closer to Tajik. Only minor lexical differences exist between the literary forms used in Iran and Afghanistan. Although both Pashtu and Dari are official languages, Dari has a special social status in the country because of its historical prestige; it is the preferred language for communication among speakers of different linguistic backgrounds. History Old Persian is attested from the cuneiform inscriptions left by the Achaemenid dynasty (559 to 331 BC.) that ruled the lands known as the Realm of the Aryans (from which comes the name of the modern country Iran) up 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 known chiefly through its use in Persian's pre-Islamic Zoroastrian religious writings. The origin of Modern Persian is not clear. Although greatly influenced and closely affiliated to Middle and Old Persian, there is no conclusive evidence that it is directly descended from these languages.

It may instead derive from a Pahlavi dialect once spoken in northeast Iran. Old Persian, by contrast, and its immediate descendant Middle Persian, originated in a province in southwest Iran that was once the center of the Persian Empire -Parsa or Fars-, hence the contemporary Persian name of the language: Farsi. The Early Modern period of the language (ninth to thirteenth centuries), preserved in the literature of the Empire, is known as Classical Persian, due to the eminence and distinction of poets such as Roudaki, Ferdowsi , and Khayyam . During this period, Persian was adopted as the lingua franca of the eastern Islamic nations. Extensive contact with Arabic led to a large influx of Arab vocabulary. In fact, a writer of Classical Persian had at one's disposal the entire Arabic lexicon and could use Arab terms freely either for literary effect or to display erudition. Classical Persian remained essentially unchanged until the nineteenth century, when the dialect of Teheran rose in prominence, having been chosen as the capital of Persia by the Qajar Dynasty in 1787. This Modern Persian dialect became the basis of what is now called Contemporary Standard Persian.

Although it still contains a large number of Arab terms, most borrowings have been nativized, with a much lower percentage of Arabic words in colloquial forms of the language. The term "Persia(n)" derives from the Greek and is based on the Ancient Greek reference to the whole region. "Farsi" is the Arabic equivalent for the name of the southwestern province of Parsa the locus of various Persian dynasties. "Iran" derives from an Old Iranian word.

Question: What is the official language of Iran?
Answer: Persian