A significant number of speakers of Tajiki Persian also live in Uzbekistan 4. In Afghanistan, Dari Persian, besides serving as the lingua franca for its multi-ethnic population, is also the first language of the majority of people.
In Iran, Persian is known by the absolute majority of the population and serves as the state language for interethnic and state communication. In the past, some three or four hundred years ago, the usage of Persian was even more widespread.
It served as a lingua franca in the east at the court of the Mughal emperors and in the west at the courts of the Ottoman sultans. Everything has a history, and languages are no exception. In fact, languages constantly change, and the study of that change is what the history of languages is all about. The same language which was spoken not more than a thousand years ago, becomes unintelligible to new speakers.
Iranian languages in general, and Persian in particular, have a very rich history. In this section, we will get a closer look at the history of its development. Languages are constantly changing, or rather developing into new languages.
They are not born, like humans, but gradually grow out of their predecessors. Simply, all languages are as old as the ability of humans to speak. There is still something to compete over. Thus, besides having a thousand-year-old exquisitely refined literature in New Persian, Persian has an even longer literary tradition. The epigraphic texts in which this language is first attested date back to years ago.
Applying this method to our case, we divide the long history of Persian into three periods: Old, Middle and New. Old Persian was spoken sometime between the 6th and 4th centuries BC. It was used in the royal inscriptions of the Achaemenid kings and in at least one administrative text. Middle Persian was generally spoken from the beginning of our era to sometime in the 8th c.
We have a comparatively rich religious and also some sparse secular literature written in this language. We have a very rich literary tradition in this language. Can you recall the vilified character of Xerxes, who tried to conquer the peaceful and freedom-loving Spartans? Have you ever read the Bible? You probably remember the praised character of Cyrus the Great , who liberated the Jews from the Babylonian Captivity, and helped them rebuild the Temple.
Achaemenids built a strong empire on the ruins of the Median, Babylonian and Lydian states. They commemorated their achievements by building magnificent palaces and writing inscriptions. Being Persian by origin, these kings chose to write their inscriptions in their own language, Old Persian.
Since Marco Polo , many European travelers have crossed the vast expanses of Iran. Many of them kept diaries and later published their books. During their journeys, many of those travelers saw the striking monuments left from the Achaemenid period, including Persepolis , the capital of Darius I.
When they came back, they brought with them the copies of a strange wedge-shaped writing, which had never been seen before by the Western Europeans. In the midth century, a number of scholars, the first of whom was Henry Creswicke Rawlinson , deciphered this script that was used to write Old Persian and learned from them about the famous rivals of the Greeks, the Achaemenid kings.
Every character in this script consists of wedge-shaped small signs, arranged together in different positions, each one of which stands for a certain sound or two sounds. Other cuneiform scripts also existed, and were used to write many languages, including Akkadian , Elamite and Urartian.
The difference between these and the Old Persian script , is that the latter is closer to an alphabetic system of writing. There are dozens of Achaemenid royal inscriptions in Iran, most of which have similar contents.
The most extensive and important inscription is the one inscribed on Mount Behistun near Kermanshah. After his accession to the throne of the Empire and the suppression of an impressive amount of rebellions, Darius I ordered the creation of this inscription to commemorate his victories. He enumerates in it the lands in which the rebellions took place, the names of the rebel leaders and describes the battles in which he defeated them. In contrast to their predecessor, these kings generally lacked the creative spark that Darius I possessed.
The contents of the majority of these inscriptions are overall very primitive and often contain nothing more than the titulary of the king and the list of the lands under their dominion. It is no surprise that the vocabulary of Old Persian that has reached us does not exceed words. What I created and what my father has created, Ahura Mazda will protect. From the viewpoint of morphological typology, Old Persian is a fusional language.
In simpler terms, it has a complex grammar with 3 grammatical genders, 6 noun-cases Nom. Russian, for instance, is also a fusional language.
Throughout their history, the Western Iranian languages to which Persian belongs have shown a particular tendency to simplify their grammar. This is especially the case with Persian. In BC Old Persian had quite a complex grammatical structure. Just years later, it reveals its tendency towards simplification.
In AD, when we already have an ample amount of literature produced in New Persian, its differences when compared with Old Persian are striking. In morphology, the language has lost the category of grammatical gender, noun-cases except Nominative , and dual number. In other words, it has become simple. Additionally, new grammatical structures have developed, like ezafe. There is a huge time-gap between the last monuments produced in Old Persian by the Achaemenid kings and the first attestations of Middle Persian.
After the Achaemenid Empire was destroyed by Alexander of Macedon , Persian ceased to be the language of the court. It took more than years for Persian to regain its official status. During this long intermediate period the language underwent significant changes.
It was after the arrival of the Sasanians - another Persian dynasty - that it again started to be used in the royal inscriptions once again. Middle Persian MP is the ancestor of modern Persian. However, from a grammatical point of view, it is much closer to New Persian.
In modern day Iran, you can find these inscriptions in places like Naqsh-e Rostam, Naqsh-e Rajab, Bishapur and many other sites. They date back to the Sasanian period AD. These inscriptions are written in a strange language, which has puzzled scholars for a long period.
Even more strange, reading its contents is not the problem here, for it was being read already in the last decade of the 18th century. Persian is the first language of about 50 percent of the population in Iran, and is the country's official language. It is the language of government, the media, and school instruction. In Afghanistan, Dari, along with Pashto, 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 Pashto 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.
Old Persian is attested from the cuneiform inscriptions left by the Achaemenid dynasty to BC. 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 Rudaki, Firdowsi, 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.
I hope this will help you clarify this issue. Each country conducts its official business in a particular language, which is intelligible to every citizen of that country at least in theory. Imagine the chaos that would ensue, if everyone suddenly decided to only speak their own language in Great Britain, instead of English!
Pakistani lawyers would write contracts in Urdu, Chinese professors would suddenly start lecturing in Chinese, and Indian manufacturers would write their instructions in Hindu or Gujarati! This is why, as a general rule, countries define their official languages in their constitutions ironically enough, English is not de jure recognized as the official language of the UK, nor England.
Thus, the above-mentioned Persian-speaking countries define their official state language in their constitutions. This institution was responsible for carrying out language reforms, modernizing the language and solving other issues related to Persian. This academic body carries official weight on matters related to the Persian language.
Hundreds of respected scholars are members of this institution. In , it released an official statement p. Of course, this statement was directed more against the usage of this name in the official correspondence of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the IRI. However, we can still garner the official stance of such an authoritative body as the APLL concerning this particular issue.
Persian, known to its native Iranian speakers as Farsi, is the official language of modern day Iran, parts of Afghanistan and the central Asian republic of Tajikistan.
Persian is one of the most important members of the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Kurdish, Baluchi, Pashtu and Osetic are the other modern Iranian languages. The Persian of Iran is written in a cursive Arabic script that can be highly ornamental. In this respect Iranians have made the art of calligraphy and refined penmanship their own.
The Persian spoken in Afghanistan is known as Dari.
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