Persian

About Persian

Persian (فارسی, Farsi) is a language in the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European family. It is a direct descendant of Middle Persian, which is derived from Old Persian. You can find many grammatical similarities between Persian and the other languages of this family. However, Persian is more similar to its contemporary languages like Sanskrit, Greek or Latin than to relatively newer languages. For instance, both Latin and Persian have a subject-object-verb (SOV) basic word order - though both also use other orders sometimes - which is uncommon among modern European languages.

Today, Persian is mainly spoken in Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Bahrain. It has official status in the first three countries but was once the official, court, or literary language of many more places ranging from Turkey through India. At this time, many Persian poets emerged from the Indian subcontinent, Central Asia and the regions under the control of the Ottoman Empire. It is still appreciated as a literary and prestigious language among the educated elite. Many people in Iran and neighboring countries know Persian fluently even if it's not their mother tongue. The Persian Empire was historically much bigger than today's Iran before losing many territories, especially to its neighbor Russia. After the 1979 revolution, many Iranians migrated to the West and as a result, there are num

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA)。Photography via Wikimedia Commons.