Persian (فارسی), also known as Farsi (local name in Iran and Afghanistan), Parsi (older local name, but still used by some speakers), Tajik (a Central Asian dialect) or Dari (local name in Afghanistan), is a language spoken in Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Bahrain and Uzbekistan. It has official-language status in the first three countries. There are over 75 million native speakers [1] (http://www.ethnologue.com/show_family.asp?subid=1000). It belongs to the Indo-European language family. It is of the Subject Object Verb type.

History

Persian is a member of the Indo-European family of languages, and within that family it belongs to the Indo-Iranian (Aryan) branch. Scholars believe the Iranian subbranch consists of the following chronological linguistic path: Old Persian (Avestan and Achaemenids Persian) → Middle Persian (Pahlavi, Parthian, and Sassanids Persian) → Modern Persian (Dari, c. 900 to present).

Old Persian, the main language of the Achaemenid inscriptions, should not be confused with the non-Indo-European Elamite language (see Behistun inscription). Over this period, the morphology of the language was simplified from the complex conjugation and declension system of Old Persian to the almost completely regularized morphology and rigid syntax of Modern Persian, in a manner often described as paralleling the development of English. Additionally, many words were introduced from neighboring languages, including Aramaic and Greek in earlier times, and later Arabic and to a lesser extent Turkish. In more recent times, some Western European words have entered the language (notably from French and English).

The language itself has greatly developed during the centuries. Due to technological developments, new words and idioms are created and enter into Persian like any other language. In Iran the Academy of Persian Language and Literature is a center that evaluates the new words in order to initiate and advise its Persian equivalent. In Afghanistan, the Academy of Sciences of Afghanistan does the same for Afghan Persian (among other languages).

Nomenclature

Persian, the more widely used and official name of the language in English, is the Hellenized form of the native term Parsi. Farsi is the Arabicized form of Parsi due to a lack of the /p/ phoneme in Standard Arabic. Its use in the English language is very recent. Native Persian speakers typically call it "Farsi" in modern usage. ISO, the Academy of Persian Language and Literature, and many other sources call the language Persian. The government of Afghanistan uses both "Dari" and "Persian" in English communications.

The Academy of Persian Language and Literature as well as most linguists and lexicographers believe that "Farsi" is not the appropriate term used for the Persian language in English. In the ISO 639-1, the local names form the basis for the language codes and for this reason "fa" is the designation for the Persian language in that system.

Dialects and close languages

Communication is generally mutually intelligible between Iranians, Tajiks, and Persian-speaking Afghans; however, by popular definition:

• Dari is the local name for the eastern dialect of Persian, one of the two official languages of Afghanistan, including Hazaragi — spoken by the Hazara people of central Afghanistan.
• Tajik could also be considered an eastern dialect of Persian, but, contrary to Iranian and Afghan Persian, it is written in the Cyrillic script.

The following are some of the closely related languages of various Iranian peoples within modern Iran proper:

• Guilaki or Gilaki — spoken in northern Iran, mainly in the province of Guilan.
• Talishi, or Talysh — spoken in northern Iran and southern parts of Republic of Azerbaijan.
• Luri, or Lori — spoken mainly in the southwestern Iranian province of Lorestan.
• Tat (a.k.a. Tati, or Eshtehardi) — spoken in parts of the Iranian provinces of East Azarbaijan, Zanjan and Qazvin.
• Dari or Gabri — spoken originally in Yazd and Kerman by the Zoroastrians of Iran. Also called Yazdi by some.

There also exists the following 'dialect':

• Judeo-Persian — known among Iranian Jews themselves as Latorayi (meaning: 'not the language of the Torah'), is an informal dialect among Iranian Jews which uses Persian grammar and structure, but heavily borrows words from Hebrew. This dialect is not common among Iranian Jews and it is generally the 'bazaar language' of Iranian Jewish merchants and store owners, and especially butchers/meat merchants, amongst themselves. In a way, it is comparable to how Yiddish developed out of German, but at a much smaller scale.

Orthography and vocabulary

Modern Persian uses a modified version of the Arabic alphabet (see below). After the conversion of Persia to Islam, it took approximately one hundred fifty years before Persians adopted the Arabic alphabet as a replacement for the older alphabet. Previously, the Persian language (Middle Persian or Pahlavi at that time) used two different alphabets: a modified version of the Aramaic alphabet, and a native Iranian alphabet called Dīndapirak (literally: religion script).

Despite their shared alphabet, however, Persian and Arabic are entirely different languages, from different linguistic families and with different phonology and grammar. Human languages, and the alphabet used to represent those languages in written form, are two different concepts, and alphabets are not intrinsic to human languages, so a shared writing system does not imply a broader relationship.

Persian adds four letters to the Arabic alphabet for its use, due to the fact that the four sounds that exist in Persian do not exist in Arabic. Additionally, it changes the shape of another two. Some people call this modified alphabet the Perso-Arabic alphabet. The additional four letters are:

The letters different in shape are:

The diacritical marks used in the Arabic script, a.k.a. harakat, are also used in Persian, although some of them have different pronunciations. For example, an Arabic Damma is pronounced as /u/, while in Persian it is pronounced as /o/.

Persian also adds the notion of a pseudo-space to the Arabic script, called a Zero Width Non-Joiner (ZWNJ) by the Unicode Standard. It acts like a space in disconnecting two otherwise-joining adjacent letters, but does not have a visual width.

It should also be noted that many Persian words with an Arabic root are spelled differently from the original Arabic word. Alef with hamza below ( إ ) always changes to alef ( ا ); teh marbuta ( ة ) usually, but not always, changes to teh ( ت ) or heh ( ه ); and words using various hamzas get spelled with yet another kind of hamza (so that مسؤول becomes مسئول).

Other languages, such as Pashto or Urdu, have taken those notions and have sometimes extended them with new letters or punctuation.

There are many loanwords in the Persian language, mostly coming from the Arabic, English, French, and Turkic languages. Also, the words that have originated in the languages spoken in the region before the Arab invasion are usually changed in the pronunciation.

Pinglish is the name given to texts written in Persian using the English alphabet. It is common for writing emails, posting to forums, and chatting.

Phonology

The functional contrast for vowels appears to be between long ( /i:/, /u:/, /ɑ:/) and short ( /e/, /o/, /ę/). Therefore, it seems possible to represent the vowels as ( /i:/, /u:/, /a:/) and ( /i/, /u/, /a/). Also note that /tʃ/ and /dʒ/ are affricates, not stops. The following chart is adapted from this Structural Sketch of Persian (http://www.humnet.ucla.edu/languagesofla/farsi/fars-sketch.htm). Certain fonts (http://www.arts.gla.ac.uk/IPA/ipafonts.html) may be needed to view phonetic characters.

Morphology

Suffixes predominate, though there are 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.

Syntax

Normal sentences are structured as "(S) (PP) (O) V". If the object is definite, then the order is "(S) (O + "rɑ:") (PP) V".

Persian and Urdu

The Persian language was crucial in the formation of a common language of the central, north and northwest regions of the Indian subcontinent. Following the Mughal conquest of India and the resulting vast Islamic empire, especially in the north and middle areas, a hybrid language of Hindi and Persian began to form around the 10th and 11th centuries CE, one that would eventually be known as Urdu ("tent" in Turkish, in allusion to the army barracks of visiting troops). It grew from the interaction of (often Persian-speaking) Muslim soldiers and native Hindu peoples, merging with the local Prakrit and Sanskrit-based Khari boli (standing tongue), a proto-Hindi dialect of the north. Soon, the Persian script and Nasta'liq form of cursive was adopted, with additional figures added to accommodate the Indian phonetic system, and a new language based on Indian grammar with a vocabulary largely divided between Persian (and indirectly some Arabic) and Hindi. Elements peculiar to Persian, such as the enclitic izaafat, and the use of the takhallus, were readily absorbed into Urdu literature, both religious and secular.

Urdu soon gained distinction as the preferred language in Persian courts of India and to this day retains an important place in literary and cultural spheres. Many distinctly Persian forms of literature, such as ghazals and nazms, came to both influence and be affected by Indian culture, producing a distinct melding of Middle Eastern and South Asian heritages. A famous cross-over writer was Amir Khusro, whose Persian and Hindvi (proto-Hindi-Urdu) couplets are to this day read in India. Persian has frequently been termed an adopted classical language of India beside Sanskrit due to its role in Indian tradition.

References

• Mace, J. (2003). Persian Grammar: For reference and revision. Routledge-Curzon, London.
• Mahootian, S. (1997). Persian. Descriptive Grammars. Routledge, London.
• Windfuhr, G. L. (1987). Persian. In Comrie, B., editor, The Worlds Major Languages, pages 523–546. Oxford University Press, Oxford.

External links

• Ethnologue report for Eastern Farsi (http://www.ethnologue.org/show_language.asp?code=PRS)
• Ethnologue report for Western Farsi (http://www.ethnologue.org/show_language.asp?code=PES)

• Easypersian.com (http://www.easypersian.com/)