Official language More than 1,000,000 speakers Between 500,000 and 1,000,000 speakers Between 100,000 and 500,000 speakers Between 25,000 and 100,000 speakers

Fewer than 25,000 speakers to none

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Persian, also known by its native name Farsi, is an ancient and beautiful language spoken by about 130 million people around the world. It belongs to the Indo-European language family. You'll find it mainly spoken in countries like Iran, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan. It's a language with a rich history and has given the world many famous stories and poems.

Understanding Persian: Its Language Family

Persian is part of a big language family called Indo-European languages. Think of it like a family tree! It's in the Indo-Iranian branch, then the Iranian group, and more specifically, the Western Iranian subgroup. Among these, Persian is the most widely spoken in the Southwestern Iranian group.

What's in a Name: Persian vs. Farsi

The name Persian comes from the ancient Greek word for Persia, which was a region in southwestern Iran. This is the traditional name used in English for centuries. The word Farsi is actually the native name for the language in Persian itself. While some people use Farsi in English, many language experts, including the Academy of Persian Language and Literature, prefer Persian. This is because it has a long history in Western languages and shows the language's cultural importance. The word Farsi comes from an older form, Pārsi, and changed over time due to the influence of Arabic.

Different Names for Standard Persian Varieties

Just like English has different accents and slight variations, Persian has a few main standard forms:

Iranian Persian is the official language of Iran. It's often simply called Persian or Farsi.
Dari Persian is the official name for the Persian spoken in Afghanistan. It's usually called Dari. The name Dari means "of the court" and refers to the elegant Persian spoken in ancient royal courts.
Tajiki Persian is the official language of Tajikistan. It's known as Tajik and is written using the Cyrillic script, which is different from the Arabic-based script used in Iran and Afghanistan.

A Journey Through Time: The History of Persian

The history of the Persian language is very long, stretching back thousands of years! We can divide its journey into three main periods: Old Persian, Middle Persian, and New Persian. These stages show how the language changed and grew over different historical eras in Iran.

Old Persian: Ancient Roots

An Old Persian inscription written in Old Persian cuneiform in Persepolis, Iran

Old Persian was spoken during the time of the powerful Achaemenid Empire (around 550–330 BCE). We know about it from royal inscriptions carved into stone, like the famous Behistun Inscription from King Darius I. These writings are some of the earliest examples of Indo-European languages. Old Persian was the official language of the Achaemenid kings and was spoken in what is now southwestern Iran.

Middle Persian: A Simpler Form

Middle Persian text written in Inscriptional Pahlavi on the Paikuli inscription from between 293 and 297. Slemani Museum, Iraqi Kurdistan.

After the Achaemenid Empire, the language evolved into Middle Persian, which was the official language of the Sasanian Empire (224–651 CE). During this time, the grammar became simpler. For example, words no longer had different forms for masculine or feminine, and the idea of "dual" (for two things) disappeared, leaving only singular and plural. Middle Persian was written using special scripts called Pahlavi scripts.

New Persian: The Modern Language

New Persian is the language spoken today. It started to develop around the 8th and 9th centuries, after the Muslim conquest of Persia. This is when the language began to be written using a modified version of the Arabic script.

Early New Persian: A New Beginning

Ferdowsi's Shahnameh

The first texts in New Persian using the Arabic script appeared in the 9th century. This new form of the language grew from the Middle Persian spoken in the Sasanian capital and in the northeastern region of Khorasan. This area was very important for the rise of New Persian. Famous poets like Rudaki flourished in the 10th century, creating beautiful verses. New Persian spread widely from the 11th century onwards, becoming a common language for communication across different regions.

Classical Persian: A Language of Empires

Kalilah va Dimna, an influential work in Persian literature

"Classical Persian" refers to the rich and standardized language used in literature and poetry from the 10th to the 18th centuries. This was the language of many famous writers like Ferdowsi, Rumi, and Omar Khayyám, whose works are still celebrated today.

Classical Persian became a very important language for culture and government across a huge area, including Greater Persia and much of the Indian subcontinent. Many powerful empires, like the Mughal Empire in India and the Ottoman Empire in Anatolia, used Persian as their official court language, even if their rulers weren't native Persian speakers. This shows how much respect and influence the language had.

Persian's Influence in India

Persian poem, Agra Fort, India, 18th century

When Turkic and Afghan rulers from Central Asia came to the Indian subcontinent, they brought Persian with them. For about 500 years before the British arrived, Persian was widely used as a second language in India. It became the main language for culture, education, and government under the Mughal Empire. Even today, you can find many Persian words in languages like Hindi-Urdu and Punjabi.

Contemporary Persian: Modern Times

Persian dialects

In the 19th century, the dialect spoken in Tehran became the most important in Iran. While Persian still had many Arabic words, they became part of Persian's own sound system and grammar. Later, during the 20th century, there were efforts to protect the Persian language. Groups like the Academy of Persian Language and Literature worked to replace foreign words with new Persian ones and to standardize how the language was written. This helped create the "Contemporary Standard Persian" we know today.

Varieties of Persian Spoken Today

Today, there are three main standard varieties of Persian, and people who speak them can generally understand each other:

Iranian Persian: Spoken in Iran, and by smaller groups in Iraq and Persian Gulf states.
Dari Persian: Spoken in Afghanistan.
Tajiki Persian: Spoken in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, and written in the Cyrillic script.

There are also many local dialects in these regions that have slight differences from the standard forms. Some closely related languages or dialects include Luri, Achomi, and Tat.

How Persian Grammar Works

Persian grammar is quite straightforward.

Word Order: In most sentences, the order is Subject-Object-Verb (SOV). For example, "I (Subject) an apple (Object) eat (Verb)."
No Gender: Unlike some languages, Persian doesn't have grammatical gender. This means that words don't change based on whether they are masculine or feminine. The same pronoun is used for "he" or "she."
Verbs: Verbs change to show who is doing the action (like "I," "you," "he/she") and when the action happens (past, present, future).

Persian Vocabulary: A Mix of Old and New

Persian has a rich vocabulary, and it's good at creating new words by combining existing ones or adding small parts (prefixes and suffixes).

Language Influences on Persian

Persian has a strong core of ancient words, but it also borrowed many words from Arabic, especially after the spread of Islam. These Arabic words were often changed to fit Persian sounds and grammar. Interestingly, many Arabic words found in other languages like Turkic or Indian languages actually came through Persian first, not directly from Arabic!

Persian also borrowed some words from Mongolian and Turkic languages because of the historical empires that ruled the region. In turn, Persian has greatly influenced the vocabularies of many other languages, including Armenian, Urdu, Bengali, Hindi, and various Turkic languages like Ottoman Turkish and Azeri.

Writing Persian: The Alphabets

The main way modern Iranian and Afghan Persian is written is with the Persian alphabet, which is a modified version of the Arabic script. Tajiki, however, uses the Cyrillic script in Tajikistan.

The Persian Alphabet

Example showing Nastaʿlīq's (Persian) proportion rules

Ali-Akbar Dehkhoda's personal handwriting, a typical cursive Persian script

The Persian alphabet adds four special letters to the Arabic alphabet to represent sounds not found in Arabic:

Isolated form	Final form	Medial form	Initial form	Name
پ	ـپ	ـپـ	پـ	pe
چ	ـچ	ـچـ	چـ	če (che)
ژ	ـژ	ـژ	ژ	že (zhe or jhe)
گ	ـگ	ـگـ	گـ	ge (gāf)

The Persian alphabet also changes the shape of some Arabic letters:

Arabic style letter	Persian style letter	Name
ك	ک	ke (kāf)
ي	ی	ye

In Persian writing, short vowels are usually not written, so you need to understand the word from its context. For example, the letters for "krm" (کرم) could mean "worm," "generosity," "cream," or "chrome."

Latin Alphabet for Persian

Sometimes, Persian is written using the ISO basic Latin alphabet, especially in online chats, emails, and text messages. This is often called Fingilish. There isn't one strict way to do it, so it can vary.

The Tajik Alphabet

Tajiki advertisement for an academy

In Tajikistan, the Cyrillic script was introduced for writing the Tajik language in the late 1930s. Before that, they used a Latin alphabet and even earlier, the Persian script.

Examples of Persian Text

Here's an example from Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, showing Persian in different scripts:

Iranian Persian (Nastaliq)	همه‌ی افراد بشر آزاد به دنیا می‌آیند و حیثیت و حقوق‌شان با هم برابر است، همه اندیشه و وجدان دارند و باید در برابر یکدیگر با روح برادری رفتار کنند.
Iranian Persian (Naskh)	همه‌ی افراد بشر آزاد به دنیا می‌آیند و حیثیت و حقوق‌شان با هم برابر است، همه اندیشه و وجدان دارند و باید در برابر یکدیگر با روح برادری رفتار کنند.‎
Iranian Persian transliteration	Hame-ye afrād-e bashar āzād be donyā mi āyand o heysiyat o hoquq-e shān bā ham barābar ast, hame andishe o vejdān dārand o bāyad dar barābare yekdigar bā ruh-e barādari raftār konand.
Iranian Persian IPA
Tajiki	Ҳамаи афроди башар озод ба дунё меоянд ва ҳайсияту ҳуқуқашон бо ҳам баробар аст, ҳамаашон андешаву виҷдон доранд ва бояд дар баробари якдигар бо рӯҳи бародарӣ рафтор кунанд.
Tajiki transliteration	Hamai afrodi bashar ozod ba dunjo meoyand va haysiyatu huquqashon bo ham barobar ast, hamaashon andeshavu vijdon dorand va boyad dar barobari yakdigar bo rūhi barodarī raftor kunand.
English translation	All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act toward one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

Images for kids

The vowel sounds of modern Tehran Persian

Persian language facts for kids

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