Persian language
Persian | |
---|---|
فارسی (transliteration: fārsi) پارسی (transliteration: pārsi) | |
Native to | Iran (Persia), Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and neighboring countries. |
Region | Middle East, Central Asia |
Native speakers | 61 million native 110 million total |
Official status | |
Official language in | Iran, Tajikistan, Afghanistan |
Regulated by | Academy of Persian Language and Literature Academy of Sciences of Afghanistan |
Language codes | |
ISO 639-1 | fa |
ISO 639-2 | per (B) fas (T) |
ISO 639-3 | Variously:prs – Eastern Persianpes – Western Persiantgk – Tajikaiq – Aimaqbhh – Bukharicdeh – Dehwaridrw – Darwazihaz – Hazaragijpr – Dzhidiphv – Pahlavani |
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Persian is a language spoken in Iran, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Bahrain, Iraq, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia, Southern Russia, neighboring countries, and elsewhere. It is known as
- فارسی (transliteration: fārsi) or پارسی (transliteration: pārsi), local name in Iran, Afghanistan and Tajikistan,
- Tajik, local name in Central Asia,
- or Dari, name given to classical Persian poetry- and court-language as well as to Persian dialects spoken in Tajikistan and Afghanistan
Prior to British colonization, Persian was also widely used as a second language in the Indian subcontinent; it took prominence as the language of culture and education in several Muslim courts in the subcontinent throughout the Middle Ages and became the "official language" under the Mughal emperors. Only in 1832 did the British force the subcontinent to begin conducting business in English instead of the traditional Persian. [1] Evidence of its former rank in the region can still be seen by the extent of its influence on Hindi and Urdu, as well as the popularity that Persian literature still enjoys in the region. Persian and its dialects have official-language status in the countries of Iran, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan. According to CIA World Factbook, there are 61 million native speakers of Persian in Iran [1], Afghanistan [2], Tajikistan [3] and Uzbekistan [4] and there are about the same number other peoples who can speak Persian throughout the world. It belongs to the Indo-European language family, and is of the Subject Object Verb type. UNESCO was asked to select Persian as one of its languages in 2006.[5]
History
Persian is a member of the Indo-European family of languages, and within that family it belongs to the Indo-Iranian branch. Scholars believe the Iranian sub-branch consists of the following chronological linguistic path: Old Iranian (Avestan and Old Persian) → Middle Iranian (Pahlavi Middle Persian and several other languages) → Modern Iranian (Persian, Pashto, Kurdish, and several other languages), 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 Tehran the Academy of Persian Language and Literature is a center that evaluates the new words in order to initiate and advise their Persian equivalents. In Afghanistan, the Academy of Sciences of Afghanistan does the same for Afghan Persian(Dari).
Nomenclature
Persian, the more widely used name of the language in English, is an Anglicized form derived from Latin *Persianus < Latin Persia < Greek Persis, a Hellenized form of Old Persian Parsa. Farsi is the Arabicized form of Parsi, due to a lack of the /p/ phoneme in Standard Arabic. Native Persian speakers typically call it “Fārsi” 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 detailed here) as well as many lexicographers have announced that “Farsi” is not the appropriate term to use 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, unlike Iranian and Afghan Persian, it is written in the Cyrillic script.
Ethnologue offers another classification for dialects of Persian language. According to this source, dialects of this language include the following:[6]
- Western Persian (in Iran)
- Eastern Persian (in Afghanistan)
- Tajik (in Tajikistan)
- Hazaragi (in Afghanistan)
- Aimaq (in Afghanistan)
- Bukharic (in Israel, Uzbekistan)
- Dehwari (in Pakistan)
- Darwazi (in Afghanistan)
- Dzhidi (in Israel)
- Pahlavani (in Afghanistan)
The following are some of the closely related languages of various Iranian peoples within modern Iran proper:
- Mazandarani, spoken in northern Iran mainly in the province of Mazandaran.
- Gileki (or Gilaki), spoken in the province of Guilan.
- Talysh (or Talishi), spoken in northern Iran and southern parts of the Republic of Azerbaijan.
- Luri (or Lori), spoken mainly in the southwestern Iranian province of Lorestan and Khuzestan.
- Tat (also 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.
Orthography
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/52/Dehkhoda_note.jpg/220px-Dehkhoda_note.jpg)
The vast majority of modern Persian text is written in a form of the Arabic alphabet. In recent years the Latin alphabet has been used by some for technological or internationalization reasons. Tajik, which is considered by many linguists to be a Persian dialect influenced by Russian, is written with the Cyrillic alphabet in Tajikistan (but not in Afghanistan).
Arabic Alphabet
Modern Persian is normally written using a modified variant of the Arabic alphabet with different pronunciation of the letters.
Script adoption
After the conversion of Persia to Islam (see Islamic conquest of Iran), it took approximately one hundred fifty years before Persians adopted the Arabic alphabet as a replacement for the older alphabet(Arabic alphabet originally comes from one of the seven persian alphabet witch was used to write the religion books before Arabs attack). Previously, two different alphabets were used for the Persian language (Middle Persian, or Pahlavi, at that time): one was also called Pahlavi and was a modified version of the Aramaic alphabet, and the other was a native Iranian alphabet called Dîndapirak (literally: religion script).
Additions
The Persian alphabet adds four letters to the Arabic alphabet, due to the fact that four sounds that exist in Persian do not exist in Arabic, as they come from separate language families. Some people call this modified alphabet the Perso-Arabic alphabet. The additional four letters are:
sound | shape | Unicode name |
[p] | پ | Peh |
[tʃ] (ch) | چ | Tcheh |
[ʒ] (zh) | ژ | Jeh |
[g] | گ | Gaf |
Variations
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).
The letters different in shape are:
sound | original Arabic letter | modified Persian letter | name |
[k] | ك | ک | Kaf |
[j] (y) and [iː], or rarely [ɑː] | ي or ى | ی | Yeh |
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 /u/, while in Persian it is pronounced /o/.
The Persian variant 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.
Extensions to other languages
The features of the Persian variant have been taken for other languages, such as Pashto or Urdu, and have sometimes been further extended with new letters or punctuation.
Latin Alphabet
The Universal Persian (UniPers / Pârsiye Jahâni) Alphabet is a Latin-based alphabet created over 50 years ago in Iran and popularized by Mohamed Keyvan, who used it in a number of Persian textbooks for foreigners and travellers. It sidesteps the difficulties of the traditional Arabic-based alphabet, with its multiple letter shapes and ambiguous spellings, and fits particularly well in contemporary electronically written media.
The "International Persian Alphabet" (IPA2)[7], commonly called Pársik, is another Latin-based alphabet developed in recent years mainly by A. Moslehi, a comparative linguist, as a project defined and maintained under the authority of Persian Linguistics Association. It is claimed to be the most accurate and regular one among Latin-based Persian alphabets in which many linguistic aspects of Modern Persian have been observed; however, its rules are not as simple as that of UniPers.
Fingilish, or Penglish, is the name given to texts written in Persian using the Basic Latin alphabet. It is most commonly used in chat, emails and SMS applications.
Phonology
- Main article: Persian phonology
The Persian language has six vowels and twenty-three consonants, including two affricates /ʧ/ (ch) and /ʤ/ (j). Historically, Persian distinguished length: the long vowels /i:/, /u:/, /ɑ:/ contrasting with the short vowels /e/, /o/, /æ/ respectively. Modern spoken Persian, however, generally does not make this distinction anymore.
![The vowel phonemes of Persian](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/57/Farsi_vowel_chart.png)
labial |
apico-dentals |
post-alveolars |
velars |
glottals |
|
voiceless stops | p |
t | ʧ |
k | ʔ |
voiced stops | b |
d | ʤ |
g | |
voiceless fricatives | f |
s | ʃ |
x | h |
voiced fricatives | v |
z |
ʒ |
ɣ | |
nasals | m |
n | |||
liquids | l, r |
||||
glides | j |
Note that /tʃ/ and /dʒ/ are affricates, not stops.
Grammar
- Main article: Persian grammar
Suffixes predominate Persian morphology, 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 for nouns, nor are pronouns marked for natural gender.
Normal declarative sentences are structured as “(S) (PP) (O) V”. This means sentences can be comprised of optional subjects, prepositional phrases, and objects, followed by a required verb. If the object is specific, then the object is followed by the word rɑ: and precedes prepositional phrases: “(S) (O + “ɑ:”) (PP) V” [2]
Vocabulary
There are many loanwords in the Persian language, mostly coming from Arabic, English, French, and the Turkic languages.
Persian has likewise influenced the vocabularies of other languages, especially Indo-Iranian languages and Turkic languages. Many Persian words have also found their way into the English language. See List of English words of Persian origin.
See also
- Academy of Persian Language and Literature
- Hindu-Arabic numerals
- Dzhidi language
- History of Urdu
- List of English words of Persian origin
- List of Persian poets and authors
- Middle Persian literature
- Persian grammar
- Persian literature
- Persian mythology
- Persian phonology
- Persian and Urdu
- The English name of the Persian Language
References
External links
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/8/80/Wikipedia-logo-v2.svg/40px-Wikipedia-logo-v2.svg.png)
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- Phonetic Farsi in Latin Characters
- Persian to English and English to Persian Dictionary
- Ethnologue report for Eastern Persian
- Ethnologue report for Western Persian
- Easypersian.com
- Farsi Dictionary from Webster's Dictionary
- Aryanpour Persian-English English-Persian Dictionary
- UCLA Language Materials Project: Persian
- UniPers.com A proposed Latin-based writing system designed specifically for the Persian language.
- Persian Linguistics Association
- American Association of Teachers of Persian (AATP)
- VOA’s Persian Language Service
- BBC’s Persian Language Service
- Deutsche Welle’s Persian Service
- An Online Persian Language Forum
- Iranian Language Family
- No More "Farsi" (Collection of articles and links about Farsi vs. Persian dispute)
- GHABIL Persian literature Magazine
- Official website of the Assembly for the Expansion of the Persian Language شوراي گسترش زبان و ادبيات فارسي