It's sometimes known as Farsi but I'm going to call it Persian. Persian is a language that is widely spoken in parts of the Middle East and in Central Asia and it has a long history stretching back thousands of years with a few different stages along the way. The Persian language originated in southwestern Persia. Today, Persia is known as Iran. Persian is the one official language of Iran and it is the native language of about half of Iranians. The statistics actually range from about 45 to 55% but I'm going to say "half" and that makes it 38.5 million people. But virtually, all other Iranians can speak Persian as a second language as well. Persian is also an official language in 2 other countries but you might not know that because they refer to the language by different names in those places.
In Afghanistan, the language is referred to as "Dari" for political reasons. but speakers of Dari Persian themselves often called their language "Farsi". It's actually really hard to get reliable statistics about Afghanistan, but most sources seem to say that it is spoken by 25 to 30 percent of the population in Afghanistan. but it is also widely used as a lingua franca and pretty much everyone in the country can speak Dari. In Tajikistan, Persian is referred to as "Tajik" because that's what the Soviet Union conquerors decided to call it. You know how foreign empires like to divide and conquer. No, no, don't be friends with that powerful country over there. No, no, you're separate, you're distinct from them. But Tajik Persian is indeed a variety of Persian. It is spoken by 6 million people in Tajikistan and another 1.5 million people in the nearby Central Asian countries, especially in Uzbekistan. Persian is also spoken by about 5 million expatriates around the world, especially in the Middle East countries, like Iraq, UAE, Bahrain, places like that, as well as the USA.
So let's recap: in Iran, there are about 38.5 million native speakers of Persian. In Afghanistan and Pakistan, there are 11 million native speakers of Dari Persian. In Tajikistan and surrounding areas, there are 7.5 million native speakers of Tajik Persian and there are about five million expat speaking Persian around the world. that comes to a total of 62 million native speakers. But if we include all the second language speakers of Persian, who use it as a lingua franca, then the number rises to 110 million speakers around the world. Are Persian, Dari and Tajik all really the same language? Yes, they are varieties of one single language, they are mutually intelligible, especially among educated speakers and the formal languages are very close to each other. There are some differences in the casual language, especially in the accent and some of the vocabulary that's used, some of the spelling, things like that. but basically, they are one language and they are mutually intelligible. One difference that I often come across is the loan words in the different varieties. So, in Iran there are more French loanwords. In Afghanistan, there are more English loan words and in Tajikistan, there are more Russian loan words.
Some people who are not so familiar with the Persian language might assume that it's related to the Arabic language because Iran is in the Middle East and is next to Iraq. But actually, Persian is in a totally different language family than the Arabic language. It is in the Indo-European language family.
That means that Persian shares historical origins with most of the languages in Europe including English as well as the languages of northern India. And more speakers of Indo-european languages find Persian much easier to learn that Arabic, because of the grammatical similarity. But it does look like Arabic because, for historical reasons, Persian is usually written in the Arabic script, except in Tajikistan. Let's look at the history.
First, there was Old Persian The oldest known records of Old Persian are in inscriptions, dating back to the first Persian Empire. These writings are written in Babylonian cuneiform script, which is one of the oldest writing forms in the world. We have writings like this from various places that were part of the first Persian Empire including:
Of course there is Iran, but there is also Romania, Armenia, Iraq, Bahrain, Turkey, and Egypt. The Middle Persian period followed, lasting roughly from 300 BCE to 800 CE. Middle Persian, commonly referred to as Pahlavi, evolved from Old Persian. Pre-Islamic Zoroastrian holy literature are where we can discover the majority of Middle Persian. During this time, the language was known to as Parsig or Parsik since the Parsa people spoke it. The Islamic conquest in 651 AD marked the beginning of a mysterious new era for the Persian language. Iranian academics refer to the next 200 years as "two centuries of stillness." mainly because there is little any literature available from that era. We're not precisely sure why,
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