Persian language

Persian is a major Western Iranian language belonging to the Iranian branch of the Indo-Iranian group of the Indo-European language family. It is a pluricentric language with three standard varieties: Iranian Persian, officially known simply as Persian; Dari, the standard form in Afghanistan; and Tajik, the standard form in Tajikistan. All three standards are mutually intelligible and share a continuous historical development from Old Persian and Middle Persian. Persian today is spoken by around 130 million people across Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, the Caucasus, and wider communities throughout Central and West Asia.
Persian functions as an official language in Iran, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan, and it has historically been influential across the wider Persianate world, serving as a literary, administrative, and cultural language from Anatolia to northern India. Its script varies by region: Iran and Afghanistan use the Persian alphabet, derived from the Arabic script, while Tajikistan uses the Cyrillic-based Tajik alphabet.

Historical origins and evolution

The Persian language traces its origins to the region of Persis (modern Fars province in southwestern Iran). It represents a continuous linguistic line from Old Persian, used in the Achaemenid Empire (550–330 BCE), through Middle Persian, the administrative, literary, and religious language of the Sasanian Empire (224–651 CE), to New Persian, which emerged in written form after the Muslim conquest of Iran in the ninth century.
Old Persian is preserved primarily in royal inscriptions written in cuneiform. Middle Persian is recorded in scripts derived from Aramaic, including various Pahlavi systems, and in Manichaean texts. New Persian, or Early Dari, adopted the Perso-Arabic script and expanded rapidly as a literary medium. It was the first major non-Arabic language to gain prominence in the Islamic courts, thereby breaking Arabic’s long-held monopoly on written scholarship and administration.
Across its history, Persian has assimilated influences from neighbouring languages while also exerting significant influence in return. Although it borrowed extensively from Arabic during the medieval period, Persian became an important prestige language in its own right, shaping vocabulary in Turkic, Armenian, Georgian, and Indo-Aryan languages. Its long-standing presence in South Asia made it an administrative and literary lingua franca in the Mughal Empire. It also held official status in the Ottoman Empire and among Afghan polities.

Geographic distribution and modern usage

Persian is spoken across a broad cultural and geographic zone historically referred to as Greater Iran, encompassing parts of West Asia, Central Asia, and South Asia. Its primary standard forms include:
• Iranian Persian, used as the official language of Iran, stipulated in the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran.• Dari, one of the two official languages of Afghanistan, used widely in administration, media, and literature.• Tajik, the state language of Tajikistan, written in the Cyrillic script and reflecting the region’s Soviet-era language reforms.
Persian-speaking populations are also found in Uzbekistan, especially native Tajik communities, and among minority groups such as the Tat people of the Caucasus. Some speakers of regional Iranian languages—including Luri, Kurdish, Balochi, and Aimaq dialects—are often multilingual in Persian due to its national or regional prestige.

Linguistic characteristics

Persian grammar shares features with many European languages, contributing to its reputation as relatively accessible for learners. It is an analytic language with a simple verbal system, limited inflection, and no grammatical gender. Its core vocabulary reflects its Indo-European roots, while centuries of cultural exchange have added layers of loanwords from Arabic, Turkic, and, in modern periods, European languages.
The Persian writing system in Iran and Afghanistan uses an extended Arabic alphabet with additional letters for Persian phonemes. In Tajikistan a Cyrillic-based alphabet has been standard since the mid-twentieth century, though earlier Tajik literature used Perso-Arabic script.
Persian phonology includes a series of vowel contrasts and consonant clusters, with a distinct stress pattern compared to other Iranian languages. The phonemic shift from p to f in many lexical items reflects historical Arabic influence, particularly in religious and literary vocabulary.

Terminology, names, and codes

The English term Persian derives from the Latin Persianus and ultimately from Greek forms connected to the ancient region of Persis. Persian scholars and linguistic institutions generally maintain that Persian should remain the preferred English designation, emphasising its historical continuity and cultural identity. The term Farsi, though the native Persian name, is discouraged in foreign-language contexts for formal usage.
Dari’s name originally referred to the language of the Sasanian court in Ctesiphon, while Tajik became the formal designation of the Persian variety in Central Asia under Soviet administration.
International language codes follow native naming conventions. Under ISO 639-1, Persian is coded as fa. The ISO 639-3 classification distinguishes pes (Iranian Persian), prs (Dari), and tgk (Tajik), with fas used as a macrolanguage code for Persian as a whole.

Literary tradition and cultural influence

Persian is associated with one of the world’s richest literary traditions. Classical Persian literature flourished from the tenth century onward, producing celebrated works across poetry, mysticism, epic, and philosophy. Major classics include Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, Rumi’s Masnavi, Omar Khayyam’s Rubāʿiyāt, Nizami’s epics, Attar’s Conference of the Birds, and the lyrical masterpieces of Hafez and Saadi. These works shaped intellectual and artistic life across the Islamic world and continue to influence global literature.
Modern Persian literature has remained vibrant, with influential poets such as Nima Yushij, Ahmad Shamlou, Forugh Farrokhzad, Mehdi Akhavan-Sales, Simin Behbahani, and Sohrab Sepehri contributing to contemporary literary movements.
Persian’s prestige in administration, scholarship, and courtly culture ensured its spread far beyond its original homeland. Its lexical, stylistic, and poetic conventions became models for neighbouring traditions and helped define the cultural identity of West and Central Asia for over a millennium.

Classification within the Iranian languages

Persian belongs to the Southwestern Iranian subgroup of the Western Iranian languages. This distinguishes it from Northwestern Iranian languages such as Kurdish and Balochi, although all share ancestry within the broader Indo-Iranian family. Persian’s continuity across Old, Middle, and New stages makes it one of the clearest examples of sustained linguistic evolution within the Iranian group.