Name	Persian
Nativename	, ,
Pronunciation
Imagecaption	fārsi (one of the local names for Persian) in Perso-Arabic script (Nasta`liq style)
States	amongst others |regionWestern Asia, Central Asia amongst others
Script	Perso-Arabic script, Cyrillic
Speakers	ca. 80-100 million, as first language (2006 estimates)
Familycolor	Indo-European
Fam1	Indo-European
Fam2	Indo-Iranian
Fam3	Iranian
Fam4	Western Iranian
Fam5	Southwestern Iranian
Dia1	Tehrani
Dia2	Dari
Dia3	Tajik
Dia4	Khorasani
Dia5	Khuzestani
Dia6	Aimaq
Dia7	Hazaragi
Dia8	Judæo-Persian
Dia19	Juhuri
Dia10	Bukhori
Dia11	Dezfuli
Nation
Agency	Academy of Persian Language and Literature (Iran)
Iso1	fa|iso2bper|iso2tfas
Iso3	fas
Lingua	58-AAC (Wider Persian) > 58-AAC-c (Central Persian)
Lc1	pes|ld1Iranian Persian
Lc2	prs|ld2Afghan Persian|ll2Dari (Persian)
Lc3	tgk|ld3Tajik|ll3Tajik language
Lc4	aiq|ld4Aimaq|ll4Aimaq language
Lc5	bhh|ld5Bukharic|ll5Bukharic language
Lc6	drw|ld6Darwazi|ll6Darwazi language
Lc7	haz|ld7Hazaragi|ll7Hazaragi language
Lc8	jpr|ld8Dzhidi|ll8Dzhidi language
Lc9	phv|ld9Pahlavani|ll9Pahlavani language
Map	MapOfPersianSpeakers.png
Mapcaption	Countries with significant Persian-speaking populations(Click on image for the legend)
Notice	IPA }}

Persian (local name: , fārsi , sometimes used in English: see Nomenclature) is an Iranian language within the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European languages. It is commonly spoken in Iran, also in Some Countries of Central Asia. The Persian language, whose native name is Fārsi (فارسی) is classified by most linguists as a continuation of Middle Persian, the official religious and literary language of Sassanid Persia, itself a continuation of Old Persian, the language of Persian Empire in the Achaemenid era. Persian is a pluricentric language and its grammar is similar to that of many contemporary European languages.

Persian language has ca. 110 million native speakers and has official status in three countries of Iran, Afghanistan and Tajikistan. For centuries Persian has also been a prestigious cultural language in western Central Asia, on the Indian subcontinent, and in Turkey.

Persian has had a considerable influence on neighboring languages, particularly the Indo-European Languages in the Caucasus and Turkic languages in Anatolia, Caucasus, and Central Asia neighboring Iranian languages, as well as Armenian, Arabic and other languages. Also to a lesser extent exerted an influence on South Asian languages, especially Urdu, as well as Hindi, Punjabi, Sindhi, Saraiki, Sylheti, Bengali, Oriya.

With a long history of literature in the form of Middle Persian before Islam, Persian was the first language in Muslim civilization to break through Arabic’s monopoly on writing, and the writing of poetry in Persian was established as a court tradition in many eastern courts. Some of the famous works in persian literature are the Shahname of Firdausi, works of Rumi, Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, Divan of Hafiz and poems of Saadi.

Classification

Persian belongs to the Western group of the Iranian branch of the Indo-European language family, which also includes Kurdish, Mazandarani, Gilaki, Talyshi and Baluchi. The language is in the Southwestern Iranian group, along with the Lorestani and Luri languages, and the Tat Persian of the Caucasus.

Nomenclature

Contemporary local nomenclature

Farsi (—transliteration: ) is the local name of the language in Iran, and is sometimes used in English when referring to the language there Tajiki and Dari ( in the Cyrillic Tajik alphabet) is the local name in Central Asia. However native Dari speakers in Afghanistan also refer to their language as Farsi.

English nomenclature

Persian, the more widely used name of the language in English, is an anglicized form derived from Latin * < Latin < Greek , a Hellenized form of Old Persian . According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term Persian as a language name is first attested in English in the mid-16th century. Native Iranian Persian speakers call it Fârsi. Fârsi is the arabicized form of Pârsi, due to a lack of the 'p' phoneme in Standard Arabic. In English, this language is historically known as "Persian", though some Persian speakers migrating to the West continued to use "Farsi" to identify their language in English and the word gained some currency in English-speaking countries. "Farsi" is encountered in some linguistic literature as a name for the language, used both by Iranian and by foreign authors. According to the OED, the term Farsi was first used in English in the mid-20th century. The Academy of Persian Language and Literature has declared 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. Most Persian language scholars such as Ehsan Yarshater and Kamran Talattof have also rejected the usage of "Farsi" in their articles.

International nomenclature

The international language encoding standard ISO 639-1 uses the code "fa", as its coding system is mostly based on the local names. The more detailed standard ISO 639-3 uses the name "Persian" (code "fas") for the dialect continuum spoken across Iran and Afghanistan. This consists of the individual languages Dari (Afghan Persian) and Iranian Persian.

A similar terminology, but with even more subdivisions, is also adopted by the LINGUIST List, where "Persian" appears as a sub-grouping under "Southwest Western Iranian". Currently, VOA, BBC, DW, and RFE/RL use "Persian Service" for their broadcasts in the language. RFE/RL also includes a Tajik service, and an 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.

History

Persian is an Iranian language belonging to the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European family of languages. In general, Iranian languages are known from three periods, usually referred to as Old, Middle, and New (Modern) periods. These correspond to three eras in Iranian history; Old era being the period from sometime before Achaemenids, the Achaemenid era and sometime after Achaemenids (that is to 400-300 BC), Middle era being the next period most officially Sassanid era and sometime in post-Sassanid era, and the New era being the period afterwards down to present day.

According to available documents, the Persian language is "the only Iranian language" for which close phylological relationships between all of its three stages are established and so that Old, Middle, and New Persian represent

The oldest records in Old Persian date back to the 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 evolved from Proto-Iranian as it evolved in the Iranian plateau's southwest. The earliest dateable example of the language is the Behistun Inscription of the Achaemenid Darius I (r. 522 BC – ca. 486 BC). Although purportedly older texts also exist (such as the inscription on the tomb of Cyrus II at Pasargadae), these are actually younger examples of the language. Old Persian was written in Old Persian cuneiform, a script unique to that language and is generally assumed to be an invention of Darius I's reign.

After Aramaic, or rather the Achaemenid form of it known as Imperial Aramaic, Old Persian is the most commonly attested language of the Achaemenid age. While examples of Old Persian have been found wherever the Achaemenids held territories, the language is attested primarily in the inscriptions of Western Iran, in particular in Parsa "Persia" in the southwest, the homeland of the tribes that the Achaemenids (and later the Sassanids) came from.

In contrast to later Persian, written Old Persian had an extensively inflected grammar, with eight cases, each declension subject to both gender (masculine, feminine, neuter) and number (singular, dual, plural).

Middle Persian

In contrast to Old Persian, whose spoken and written forms must have been dramatically different from one another, written Middle Persian reflected oral use. The complex conjugation and declension of Old Persian yielded to the structure of Middle Persian in which the dual number disappeared, leaving only singular and plural, as did gender. Middle Persian used postpositions to indicate the different roles of words, for example an -i suffix to denote a possessive "from/of" rather than the multiple (subject to gender and number) genitive caseforms of a word.

Although the "middle period" of the Iranian languages formally begins with the fall of the Achaemenid Empire, the transition from Old- to Middle Persian had probably already begun before the 4th century. However, Middle Persian is not actually attested until 600 years later when it appears in Sassanid era (224–651) inscriptions, so any form of the language before this date cannot be described with any degree of certainty. Moreover, as a literary language, Middle Persian is not attested until much later, to the 6th or 7th century. And from the 8th century onwards, Middle Persian gradually began yielding to New Persian, with the middle-period form only continuing in the texts of Zoroastrian tradition.

The native name of Middle Persian was Parsik or Parsig, after the name of the ethnic group of the southwest, that is, "of Pars", Old Persian Parsa, New Persian Fars. This is the origin of the name Farsi as it is today used to signify New Persian. Following the collapse of the Sassanid state, Parsik came to be applied exclusively to (either Middle or New) Persian that was written in Arabic script. From about the 9th century onwards, as Middle Persian was on the threshold of becoming New Persian, the older form of the language came to be erroneously called Pahlavi, which was actually but one of the writing systems used to render both Middle Persian as well as various other Middle Iranian languages. That writing system had previously been adopted by the Sassanids (who were Persians, i.e. from the southwest) from the preceding Arsacids (who were Parthians, i.e. from the northeast). While Rouzbeh (Abdullah Ibn al-Muqaffa, 8th century) still distinguished between Pahlavi (i.e. Parthian) and Farsi (i.e. Middle Persian), this distinction is not evident in Arab commentaries written after that date.

Gernot Windfuhr considers new Persian as an evolution of the Old Persian language and the Middle Persian language but also states that none of the known Middle Persian dialects is the direct predecessor of the [New] Persian Professor. Ludwig Paul states: "The language of the Shahnameh should be seen as one instance of continuous historical development from Middle to New Persian"

New Persian

The history of New Persian itself spans more than 1,000–1,200 years. The development of the language in its last period is often divided into three stages dubbed early, classical, and contemporary. Native speakers of the language can in fact understand early texts in Persian with minimal adjustment, because the morphology and, to a lesser extent, the lexicon of the language have remained relatively stable for the most part of a millennium.

Early New Persian

New Persian developed from the 8th century on as an independent literary language. Upon the decline of the Caliphate at Baghdad in the ninth century a.d. began the re-establishment of Persian national life and Persians laid the foundations for a renaissance in the realm of letters. New Persian was born in Eastern Iran through the adaptation of the spoken form of Sassanian Middle Persian court language. The cradle of the Persian literary renaissance lay also in Eastern Iran.

The mastery of the newer speech having now been transformed from Middle- into New Persian was already complete during three princely dynasties of Iranian origin Tahirid (820-872), Saffarid (860-903) and Samanid (874-999), and could develop only in range and power of expression.

Abbas of Merv is mentioned as being the earliest minstrel to chant verse in the newer Persian tongue and after him the poems of Hanzala Badghisi were among the most famous between the Persian-speakers of the time.

The first significant Persian poet was Rudaki. He flourished in the 10th century, when the Sāmānids were at the height of their power. His reputation as a court poet and as an accomplished musician and singer has survived, although little of his poetry has been preserved. Among his lost works is versified fables collected in Kalilah wa Dimnah.

The language spread geographically from the 11th century on and was the medium through which among others, Central Asian Turks became familiar with Islam and urban culture. New Persian was widely used as a transregional lingua franca, a task for which it was particularly suitable due to its relatively simple morphological structure and this situation persisted till at least 19th century. In the late Middle Ages, new Islamic literary languages were created on the Persian model: Ottoman, Chaghatay and Urdu, which are regards as "structural daughter languages" of Persian.

Classic Persian

The Islamic conquest of Persia marks the beginning of the new history of Persian language and literature. This period produced world class Persian language poets and the language served, for a long span of time, as the lingua franca of the eastern parts of Islamic world and South Asia. It was also the official and cultural language of many Islamic dynasties, including Samanids, Buyids, Tahirids, Ziyarids, the Mughal Empire, Timurids, Ghaznavid, Seljuq, Khwarezmids, Safavid, Afsharids, Zand, Qajar, Ottomans and also many Mughal successor states such as the Nizams etc. For example, Persian was the only oriental language known and used by Marco Polo at the Court of Kublai Khan and in his journeys through China. 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 adopt many words from Arabic and as time went by, a few words were even taken from Turko-Mongol languages under the Mongol Empire and Turco-Persian society.

Use in South Asia

For five centuries prior to the British colonization, Persian was widely used as a second language in South Asia. It took prominence as the language of culture and education in several Muslim courts in South Asia and became the sole "official language" under the Mughal emperors. Coinciding with the Safavid rule over Iran, when (royal) patronage of Persian poets was curtailed, the centre of Persian culture and literature moved to the Mughal Empire, which had huge financial resources to employ a veritable army of Persian courtly poets, lexicographers and other literati. Beginning in 1843, though, English gradually replaced Persian in importance on the South Asia. Evidence of Persian's historical influence there can be seen in the extent of its influence on the languages of the South Asia, as well as the popularity that Persian literature still enjoys in that region. Persian exerted a strong influence on Urdu, the national language of Pakistan.

Contemporary Persian

Since the nineteenth century, Russian, French and English and many other languages have 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.

Varieties

There are three modern varieties of standard Persian: Iranian Persian is the variety of Persian spoken in Iran, sometimes referred to as Farsi or just Persian.

Dari is the Persian spoken in Afghanistan. It is also referred to as Eastern Persian and its local name by native dari speakers is Farsi, its name officially changed to Dari in 1964 due to polictial reasons.

Tajik is the variety of Persian used in Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Russia, but unlike the Persian used in Iran and Dari used Afghanistan, it is written in the Cyrillic script rather than Persian script.

The three mentioned varieties are based on the classic Persian literature. There are also several local dialects from Iran, Afghanistan and Tajikistan which slightly differ from the standard Persian. Hazaragi (in Central Afghanistan and Pakistan), Herati (in Western Afghanistan), Darwazi (in Afghanistan and Tajikistan), Tehrani (in Iran) and Dehwari (in Pakistan) are examples of these dialects. Educated speakers of Iran, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan can understand one another with a relatively high degree of mutual intelligibility, give or take minor differences in vocabulary, pronunciation, and grammar – much in the same relationship as shared between British and American English.

ISO 639-3 lists ten dialects of Persian, the three main literary dialects listed above and seven regional dialects: Hazaragi, Aimaq, Bukharic, Dzhidi, Dehwari, Darwazi, Pahlavani.

The following are some closely related languages to Persian:

Luri (or Lori), spoken mainly in the southwestern Iranian provinces of Lorestan, Kohgiluyeh and Boyer-Ahmad Province, some western parts of Fars Province and some parts of Khuzestan.

Tat, spoken in parts of Azerbaijan, Russia, etc. It includes Judeo-Tat & Christian-Tat.

Lari (in southern Iran)

Phonology

Iranian Persian has six vowels and twenty-three consonants.

Vowels

Historically, Persian has distinguished length: Early New Persian possessed a series of five long vowels (, , , and ) along with three short vowels , and . At some point prior to the sixteenth century within the general area that is today encompassed by modern Iran, and merged into , and and merged into . Thus, the older contrasts between words like shēr "lion" and shīr "milk," were lost. There are exceptions to this rule and in some words, "ē" and "ō" are preserved or merged into the diphthongs and (which are descendents of the diphthongs and in Early New Persian), instead of merging into and . Examples of this exception can be found in words such as (bright).

However, in the eastern varieties, the archaic distinction of and (respectively known as Yā-ye majhūl and Yā-ye ma'rūf) is still preserved, as well as the distinction of and (known as Wāw-e majhūl and Wāw-e ma'rūf). On the other hand, in standard Tajik, the length distinction has disappeared and merged with , and with . Therefore, contemporary Afghan dialects are the closest one can get to the vowel inventory of Early New Persian.

According to most studies on the subject (e.g. Samareh 1977, Pisowicz 1985, Najafi 2001,) the three vowels which are traditionally considered long (, , ) are currently distinguished from their short counterparts (, , ) by position of articulation, rather than by length. However, there are studies (e.g. Hayes 1979, Windfuhr 1979) which consider vowel-length to be the active feature of this system, i.e. /ɒ/, /i/, and /u/ are phonologically long or bimoraic whereas /æ/, /e/, and /o/ are phonologically short or monomoraic.

There are also some studies which consider quality and quantity to be both active in the Iranian system (e.g. Toosarvandani 2004). This view offers a synthetic analysis which includes both quality and quantity, often suggesting that modern Persian vowels are in a transition state between the quantitative system of classical Persian and a hypothetical future Persian which will eliminate all traces of quantity, and retain quality as the only active feature.

Suffice it to say that the length-distinction is strictly observed by careful reciters of classic-style poetry, for all varieties (including the Tajik).

Consonants

!	Labial consonant	Labial	Alveolar consonant>Alveolar	Palatal consonant>Postalveolar	Palatal consonant>Palatal	Velar consonant>Velar	Uvular consonant>Uvular	Glottal consonant>Glottal
Nasal consonant>Nasal			|
Plosive consonant>Plosive		|
Affricate consonant>Affricate		|
Fricative consonant>Fricative		|
Tap consonant>Tap		|
Trill consonant>Trill		|
Approximant consonant>Approximant		|

(Where symbols appear in pairs, the one to the right represents a voiced consonant. Allophones are in phonetic brackets.)

Grammar

Morphology

Suffixes predominate Persian morphology, though there is 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 in Persian, nor are pronouns marked for natural gender.

Syntax

Normal declarative sentences are structured as "(S) (PP) (O) V". This means sentences can comprise optional subjects, prepositional phrases, and objects, followed by a required verb. If the object is specific, then the object is followed by the word rā and precedes prepositional phrases: "(S) (O + rā) (PP) V".

Vocabulary

Native word formation

Persian makes extensive use of word building and combining affixes, stems, nouns and adjectives. Persian frequently uses derivational agglutination to form new words from nouns, adjectives, and verbal stems. New words are extensively formed by compounding – two existing words combining into a new one, as is common in German. Professor Mahmoud Hessaby demonstrated that Persian can derive 226 million words.

Influences

While having a lesser influence on Arabic and other languages of Mesopotamia and its core vocabulary being of Middle Persian origin, New Persian contains a considerable amount of Arabic lexical items,

John R. Perry in his article "Areas and Semantic Fields of Arabic" indicates his belief that the overall range of Arabic synonyms vocabulary used along or interchangeable with their equivalents Persian words varies from 2.4% frequency in the Shahnama, 14% in material culture, 24% in intellectual life to 40% of everyday literary activity. Most of the Arabic words used in Persian are either synonyms of native terms or could be (and often have been) glossed in Persian. The Arabic vocabulary in Persian is thus suppletive, rather than basic and has enriched New Persian.

The inclusion of Mongolian and Turkic elements in the Persian language should also be mentioned, not only because of the political role a succession of Turkic dynasties played in Iranian history, but also because of the immense prestige Persian language and literature enjoyed in the wider (non-Arab) Islamic world, which was often ruled by sultans and emirs with a Turkic background. The Turkish and Mongolian vocabulary in Persian is minor in comparison and these words were mainly confined to military, pastoral terms and political sector (titles, administration, etc.) until new military and political titles were coined based partially on Middle Persian (e.g. Artesh for army instead of Qoshun) in the 20th century.

There are also adaptations from French (mainly in the late 19th century and early 20th century) and Russian (mainly in the late 19th century and early 20th century). Like most languages of the world, there is an increasing amount of English vocabulary entering the Persian language. The Persian academy (Farhangestan) has coined Persian equivalents for some of these terms. There are more words adopted from French than from English because Persian speakers more easily pronounce French words.

Persian has likewise influenced the vocabularies of other languages, especially other Indo-Iranian languages like Urdu and to a lesser extent Hindi, etc., as well as Turkic languages like Ottoman Turkish, Chagatai language, Tatar language, Turkish, Turkmen, Azeri and Uzbek, Afro-Asiatic languages like Assyrian and Arabic, and even Dravidian languages especially Telugu and Brahui. Several languages of southwest Asia have also been influenced, including Armenian and Georgian. Persian has even influenced the Malay spoken in Malaysia and Swahili in Africa. Many Persian words have also found their way into other Indo-European languages including the English language. Persian has also had a significant lexical influence, via Turkish, on Serbian, especially as spoken in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Use of occasional foreign synonyms instead of Persian words can be a common practice in everyday communications as an alternative expression. In some instances in addition to the Persian vocabulary, the equivalent synonyms from multiple foreign languages can be used. For example, the phrase "thank you" can be expressed using the French word merci (stressed however on the first syllable), by the hybrid Persian-Arabic word moteshaker-am, or by the pure Persian word sepasgozar-am.

Orthography

The vast majority of modern Iranian Persian and Dari text is written with the Arabic script. 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 script in Tajikistan (see Tajik alphabet).

Persian alphabet

Modern Iranian Persian and Afghan Persian are written using a modified variant of the Arabic alphabet (see Perso-Arabic script), which uses different pronunciation and additional letters not found in Arabic. Tajik Persian, as used in Tajikistan, is typically written in a modified version of the Cyrillic alphabet. There are also Persian Romanizations like Desphilic, Unipers and Penglish(fingilish) for writing Persian using Latin alphabet. After the conversion of Persia to Islam (see Islamic conquest of Iran), it took approximately 150 years before Persians adopted the Arabic script in place of the older alphabet. Previously, two different scripts were used, Pahlavi, used for Middle Persian, and the Avestan alphabet (in Persian, Dîndapirak or Din Dabire—literally: religion script), used for religious purposes, primarily for the Avestan language but sometimes for Middle Persian.

In modern Persian script, vowels that are referred to as short vowels (a, e, o) are usually not written; only the long vowels (â, i, u) are represented in the text, so words distinguished from each other only by short vowels are ambiguous in writing: kerm "worm", karam "generosity", kerem "cream", and krom "chrome" are all spelled "krm" in Persian. The reader must determine the word from context. The Arabic system of vocalization marks known as harakat is also used in Persian, although some of the symbols have different pronunciations. For example, an Arabic damma is pronounced , while in Iranian Persian it is pronounced . This system is not used in mainstream Persian literature; it is primarily used for teaching and in some (but not all) dictionaries.

It is also worth noting that there are several letters generally only used in Arabic loanwords. These letters are pronounced the same as similar Persian letters. For example, there are four functionally identical 'z' letters (ز ذ ض ظ), three 's' letters (س ص ث), two 't' letters (ط ت), etc.

Additions

The Persian alphabet adds four letters to the Arabic alphabet:

Sound	Isolated form	Name
[p]		pe
(ch)		če
(zh)		že
[ɡ]		gāf

(The že is pronounced with the same sound as the "s" in "measure" and "fusion", or the "z" in "azure".)

Variations

The Persian alphabet also modifies some letters from the Arabic alphabet. For example, alef with hamza below ( إ ) changes to alef ( ا ); words using various hamzas get spelled with yet another kind of hamza (so that مسؤول becomes مسئول); and teh marbuta ( ة ) changes to heh ( ه ) or teh ( ت ).

The letters different in shape are:

Sound	original Arabic letter	modified Persian letter	name
[k]			kāf
vowel consonant			ye

Writing the letters in their original Arabic form is not typically considered to be incorrect, but is not normally done.

Latin alphabet

The International Organization for Standardization has published a standard for simplified transliteration of Persian into Latin, ISO 233-3, titled "Information and documentation – Transliteration of Arabic characters into Latin characters – Part 3: Persian language – Simplified transliteration" but the transliteration scheme is not in widespread use.

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 is the name given to texts written in Persian using ISO basic Latin alphabet. It is most commonly used in chat, emails and SMS applications. The orthography is not standardized, and varies among writers and even media (for example, typing 'aa' for the phoneme is easier on computer keyboards than on cellphone keyboards, resulting in smaller usage of the combination on cellphones).

UniPers, short for the Universal Persian Alphabet (Fârsiye Jahâni) is a Latin-based alphabet 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.

Persá is yet another Latin-based alphabet that has been recently developed using new characters to represent sounds unique to the Persian language.

Desphilic is also a romanization which uses ordinary Latin character set for romanization of Persian.

Tajik alphabet

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.

Examples

Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Please note that the Tajik text is different from that of the Iranian Persian:

{| |- !Iranian Persian(Farsi) !! UniPers !! IPA !! Tajik Persian(Tajiki) !! English Gloss |- |dir="rtl"|همهٔ افراد بشر آزاد به دنیا می‌آیند و حیثیت و حقوقشان با هم برابر است، همهٔ‌شان اندیشه و وجدان دارند و باید در برابر یکدیگر با روح برادری رفتار کنند. |Hameye afrâde bašar âzâd be donyâ miâyando heysiyato hoquqešan bâ ham barâbar ast, hame andiševo vejdân dârando bâyad dar barâbare yekdigar bâ ruhe barâdari raftâr konand. | |Тамоми одамон озод ба дунё меоянд ва аз лиҳози манзилату ҳуқуқ бо ҳам баробаранд. Ҳама соҳиби ақлу виҷдонанд, бояд нисбат ба якдигар бародарвор муносабат намоянд. |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

Dari (Persian)

List of English words of Persian origin

List of French loanwords in Persian

List of Persian poets and authors

Persian Alphabet

Persian grammar

Persian literature

Persian mythology

Persian name

Persian phonology

Persianate

Persian Romanization schemes

Southwestern Iranian dialects

Tajik language

Gender-neutrality in genderless languages

Notes

Further reading

English # # # # # # # Other Languages # #

External links

Farsi Phrasebook at Wikitravel

Persian audio lessons at WikiBabel

Hayyim, Sulayman. New Persian–English dictionary. Teheran: Librairie-imprimerie Beroukhim, 1934–1936. uchicago.edu

Steingass, Francis Joseph. A Comprehensive Persian–English dictionary. London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1892. uchicago.edu

Persian language department at University of Texas at Austin, utexas.edu

Virtual Persian Keyboard, choone.com

UCLA Language Materials Project: Persian, ucla.edu

Persian Language Resources, parstimes.com

Persian-Farsi – site for studying persian, Persian-farsi.ucoz.ru

Iran language Institute, ili.ir

Navid Fazel, Descriptive Grammar of New Persian, fazel.de

GlobalDic.Com the only dynamic Persian to English and German Dictionary

German Persian Dictionary with 120,000 entries, Persian.free-dict.de

A Persian Verb calculator, jahanshiri.ir

Persian Verb Conjugator, sartre2.byu.edu

Category:Iranian culture Category:Languages of Iran Category:Languages of Iraq Category:Languages of Central Asia Category:Southwestern Iranian languages Category:SOV languages

af:Persies ar:لغة فارسية an:Idioma persa arc:ܠܫܢܐ ܦܪܣܝܐ az:Fars dili bn:ফার্সি ভাষা zh-min-nan:Pho-su-gí be:Персідская мова be-x-old:Пэрсыдзкая мова bo:ཏ་ཟིག་གི་སྐད། bs:Perzijski jezik br:Perseg bg:Персийски език ca:Persa cv:Перс чĕлхи ceb:Pinulongang Persiyano cs:Perština cy:Perseg da:Persisk (sprog) de:Persische Sprache dv:ފާރިސީ et:Pärsia keel el:Περσική γλώσσα es:Idioma persa eo:Persa lingvo eu:Persiera fa:زبان فارسی hif:Farsi bhasa fr:Persan fy:Perzysk ga:An Pheirsis gl:Lingua iraniana gu:ફારસી ko:페르시아어 hy:Պարսկերեն hi:फ़ारसी भाषा hsb:Persišćina hr:Perzijski jezik id:Bahasa Persia os:Персайнаг æвзаг is:Persneska it:Lingua persiana he:פרסית jv:Basa Parsi ka:სპარსული ენა kk:Парсы тілі kw:Persek sw:Kiajemi ku:Zimanê farisî la:Lingua Persica moderna lv:Persiešu valoda lt:Persų kalba lij:Lengua farsi li:Perzisch hu:Perzsa nyelv mk:Персиски јазик mg:Fiteny persana ml:പേർഷ്യൻ ഭാഷ mr:फारसी भाषा arz:فارسى mzn:Farski ms:Bahasa Parsi nl:Perzisch new:फारसी भाषा ja:ペルシア語 ce:Persidhoyn mott no:Persisk nn:Persisk oc:Persan mhr:Фарси йылме pnb:فارسی ps:پاړسي tpi:Tok Pesia pl:Język perski pt:Língua persa kbd:Парсыбзэ ro:Limba persană qu:Pharsi simi rue:Перьскый язык ru:Персидский язык sco:Persie leid sq:Gjuha perse simple:Persian language sk:Perzské jazyky sl:Perzijščina ckb:زمانی فارسی sr:Персијски језик sh:Perzijski jezik fi:Persian kieli sv:Persiska tl:Wikang Persiyano ta:பாரசீக மொழி roa-tara:Lènga persiane tt:Фарсы теле te:పర్షియన్ భాష th:ภาษาเปอร์เซีย tg:Забони Форсӣ tr:Farsça uk:Перська мова ur:فارسی زبان ug:پارس تىلى vi:Tiếng Ba Tư war:Pinersyano yi:פערסיש yo:Èdè Pẹ́rsíà diq:Farski bat-smg:Persu kalba zh:波斯语