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History and Origins of Persian (Farsi) and Dari-Persian
language
Farsi or
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 the
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, for example,
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 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.
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.
Notable Features
 Words are
written from right to left, numbers are written from
left to right
Short vowels
are not written, which means the pronunciation and
meaning of many words is determined by context.
Most letters
change form depending on whether they appear at the
beginning, middle, or end of a word, or on their own.
Arabic loan
words are written with their originally spelling, though
they are often pronounced quite differently in Persian.
Alphabet
Remember,
alif (-) is the first letter, baa (b) is the second.
Numerals
The
symbols for 4, 5, and 6 are different from the Arabic
ones.
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