The PERSIAN LANGUAGE

The Persian language, also known as Farsi, is the most widely spoken member of the Iranian branch of the Indo-Iranian languages, a subfamily of the Indo-European languages.  It is the language of Iran and is also widely spoken in Afghanistan and, in an archaic form, in Tajikistan and the Pamir Mountain region.  Farsi was much more widespread and widely understood throughout all the Middle East during the old Persian Empire.

Three phases may be distinguished in the development of Farsi:  Old, Middle and Modern.  Old Persian dates back to 550-330 BC.  It was written in the Sanskrit alphabet.  This language could be found written on the stones of the Persian king of the Achaemenid dynasty.

Middle Persian was developed during the Parthian Empire (250BC-226AD).  Middle Persian is also called Pahlavi (a term more strictly reserved for a form of the language used in certain Zoroastrian writings).

The Middle Persian or Pahlavi language declined after the Arab conquest in the 7^th century.  The Arabic script came to be used for the written form of Persian, with the addition of four characters:  P, Ch, G, and Jh, to accommodate special sounds.

New Persian has remained virtually unchanged since the eleventh century AD.  The Arabs introduced their script. Today’s Farsi is written from right to left, just like Arabic.  The Arabs, however, were impressed with Farsi and adopted Farsi in their courts and palaces.  In fact, it was spoken at the court of the Turkish sultan in Istanbul and also in major cities such as Damascus, Baghdad, and Cairo.  With the decline of the Persian Empire, the use of Farsi outside of Iran faded out.

Modern Farsi

Purification of the Persian language was among the numerous socio-economic reforms that took place at the time of Reza Shah.  In the 1930s, a committee of high scholars of Persian studies was formed with a mandate to replace foreign words with authentic Persian words.  The objective was accomplished to a large extent.  The textbooks used in schools and at the University of Tehran were written accordingly.  Government offices were ordered to use the new vocabulary in their correspondence.

Up to World War II, Iranians interested in pursuing advanced studies usually would go to France.  These people, upon their return, were instrumental in mixing French words in conversational Farsi.  More or less it was considered to be prestigious to use a few French words in a conversation.  World War II and the ubiquitous presence of American culture and English language in Iran, through the US army in Iran, US movies, and later on the return of numerous students from the US, introduced English into Farsi. 

Today, the Iranian government discourages this linguistic diversity, with Arabic being the only exception because Arabic is the language of the Koran, and it is the language that the clerics are supposed to be acquainted with.  However, the new technology, the expansion of electronic communication, and the fact that more than 85 percent of the people are literate and 70 percent are under the age of thirty, English has found its way into modern Farsi.

Farsi is the official language in Iran; this is the language of any literate Iranian.  However, only 58 percent of the population in Iran uses Farsi as their native language.  There are other ethnic groups that have their own dialects.  The Azaris, the Kurds, the Lurs, and the Arabs who settled in some parts of the country, all use their own community languages.

Word Order

Persian has a Subject Object Verb (SOV) word order. The main clause precedes a subordinate clause. The interrogative particle āyā (آیا), which asks a yes/no question, appears at the beginning of a sentence. Modifiers normally follow the nouns they modify, although they can precede nouns in limited uses. The language uses prepositions, uncommon to many SOV languages.

Normal sentences are structured subject-preposition-object-verb. However, Persian can have relatively free word order, often called "scrambling." This is because the parts of speech are generally unambiguous, and prepositions and the accusative marker help disambiguate the case of a given noun phrase. This scrambling characteristic has allowed Persian a high degree of flexibility for versification and rhyming.

Nouns

Persian nouns have no grammatical gender. Persian nouns mark with an accusative marker only for the specific accusative case; the other oblique cases are marked by prepositions. Possession is expressed by special markers. Inanimate nouns pluralize with -hā, while animate nouns generally pluralize with -ān, although -hā is also common. Special rules exist for some nouns borrowed from Arabic.

Pronouns

Persian is a null-subject language, so nominal pronouns are optional. Pronouns generally are the same for nominative, accusative, oblique, and genitive cases. The first-person singular accusative form mæn rā can be shortened to mærā..

Adjectives

Adjectives typically follow the nouns they modify. However, adjectives can precede nouns in compounded derivational forms, such as khosh-bækht (lit. good-luck) 'lucky', and bæd-kār (lit. bad-deed) 'wicked'. Comparative forms make use of the suffix tær (تَر), while the superlative form uses the suffix tærin (تَرین).

Letters

Below are the 32 letters of Persian.

Letters lacking an initial or medial version are never tied to the following letter, even within a word.