Persian, also known as Farsi is the most widely spoken member of Iranian branch of Indo-Iranian languages, a subfamily of Indo-European language. It is the official language of Iran, Afghanistan and the central Asian Republic of Tajikistan but historically a more widely understood language in an area ranging from the Middle East to India. Majority of the Persian speakers found in Persian Gulf countries i,e. Bahrain. Iraq, Oman, Yemen and the United Arab Emirates. Meanwhile it is also spoken by large communities in the US.
More than 120 million people speak Persian as heir first or second language. The total number of Persian speakers is high, about 50% of Iran’s population speak Farsi which is approximately 30 million, 25% of Afghanistan’s population which is approximately about 7 million and about 2 million Dari Persian speakers are in Pakistan.
Farsi in Iran is written in a variety of the Arabic script called Perso-Arabic, which has some innovations to account for Persian phonological differences. This script came into use in Persia after the Islamic conquest in the seventh century. The Persian spoken in Afghanistan is known as Dari. The Persian language of Tajikistan is called Tajiki. During the Soviet era Tajiki had minimal contact with other Persian speaking countries; it contains a large number of Russian words and is written in the Cyrillic (Russian) script.
Historically there are three major periods of development within the Persian language: Old Persian, the language of the Achaemenians (650 – 350 B.C.), Middle Persian (350 B.C. – 230 A.D). and, immediately following that the Sasanian period (230 A.D – 650 A.D.), and New Persian, which started to take shape after the Iranian conquest by the Arabian armies in the seventh century.
Old Persian is vouch from the cuneiform inscriptions left by the Achaemenid dynasty (559 to 331 BC.) that ruled the lands known as the Realm of the Aryans (from which comes the name of the modern country Iran) up until the conquest of Alexander the Great.
Middle Persian, also known as Pahlavi, after the Parthians who ruled Persia following the collapse of Alexander’s Empire, is known chiefly through its use in Persian’s pre-Islamic Zoroastrian religious writings. Another variant of Middle Persian is known locally as Persik was the official language of the Sasanian Dynasty.
Classical Persian remained essentially unchanged until the nineteenth century, when the dialect of Teheran rose in prominence, having been chosen as the capital of Persia by the Qajar dynasty in 1787. Modern Persian dialect became the basis of what is now called Contemporary Standard Persian. Although it still contains a large number of Arab terms, most borrowings have been nativised, with a much lower percentage of Arabic words in conversational forms of the language.
Persian is the second language of Islam and was instrumental in the spread of the faith during the reign of the Moguls in the Indian subcontinent, where it was cultivated and held in high esteem until the end of the Mogul rule in 1837. Persian poetry is still a significant part of the literature of the subcontinent. The presence of many Persian words in Urdu offers a high degree of mutual intelligibility to speakers of these languages.
No comments:
Post a Comment