Persian(Farsi)

A Language of Empires and Poetry

Persian, known natively as Farsi, is one of the world's oldest continuously spoken languages, with a recorded history stretching back over 2,500 years. It belongs to the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European language family, making it a distant relative of English, French, and Hindi rather than of Arabic, despite sharing the Arabic script. Persian has passed through three distinct historical stages — Old Persian, the language of the Achaemenid Empire and the inscriptions of Darius and Xerxes; Middle Persian, the language of the Sassanid Empire; and New Persian, the language that emerged after the Islamic conquest of Persia in the 7th century and which, with relatively modest changes, is still spoken today. This extraordinary continuity makes Persian one of the few languages in the world where a modern speaker can, with some study, read texts composed two thousand years ago.

The Golden Age of Persian Literature

Persian has one of the richest and most celebrated literary traditions in human history. Following the Islamic conquest, Persian underwent a remarkable renaissance between the 9th and 15th centuries, producing some of the greatest poetry ever written in any language. Rumi, whose mystical verses in his Masnavi and Divan-e Shams have made him one of the best-selling poets in the modern world; Hafez, whose Divan is kept in Iranian homes as a book of divination and wisdom; Ferdowsi, whose monumental Shahnameh — the Book of Kings — preserved pre-Islamic Persian mythology and history in 60,000 verses; and Omar Khayyam, whose Rubaiyat became beloved across the world through Edward FitzGerald's English translation. This literary heritage is not merely historical — it remains a living, deeply felt part of Persian cultural identity to this day.

Persian Across Three Countries

Persian is today the official language of Iran, where it is called Farsi, as well as Afghanistan, where it is known as Dari, and Tajikistan, where it is called Tajik and written in a modified Cyrillic alphabet rather than the Persian script. These three varieties are mutually intelligible to a significant degree, particularly in their written and formal registers, though they differ in pronunciation, vocabulary, and some grammatical features. Persian also served for centuries as the prestige literary and administrative language of the Mughal Empire in the Indian subcontinent and the Ottoman court in Turkey, leaving a profound legacy in Urdu, Hindi, Turkish, and many other languages of the region. Thousands of Persian loanwords remain embedded in these languages to this day.

A Script Borrowed and Transformed

Persian is written in a modified form of the Arabic script, adopted after the Islamic conquest of Persia in the 7th century. The Persian alphabet contains 32 letters — the 28 letters of the Arabic alphabet plus four additional letters created to represent sounds specific to Persian that do not exist in Arabic. Like Arabic, Persian is written and read from right to left, and like Arabic, short vowels are generally not written in everyday text, being omitted and inferred by the reader from context. Despite sharing a script with Arabic, the two languages are entirely unrelated — Persian is Indo-European while Arabic is Semitic — and a speaker of one cannot understand the other without dedicated study. Persian script is also used, with modifications, for Urdu, Pashto, and several other languages across the region.