Persian language

Persian (فارسی   or پارسی ) or Farsi is an Iranian language in the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European languages. It is widely spoken in Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Bahrain. It has official language status in Iran, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan under different names. It's called Farsi in Iran, Dari in Afghanistan, and Tajiki in Central Asia, especially Tajikistan.

The vast majority of modern Iranian Persian and Dari text is written in a form of the Arabic alphabet. Tajik, which is considered by some linguists to be a Persian dialect influenced by Russian and the Turkic languages of Central Asia, is written in the Cyrillic alphabet in Tajikistan.

Modern Iranian, Persian, and Dari are normally written using a modified variant of the Arabic alphabet with different pronunciation and more letters, whereas the Tajik variety is typically written in a modified version of the Cyrillic alphabet.

About 150 years after the conversion to Islam, Persians replaced the older alphabet with the Arabic alphabet. Previously, two different alphabets were used: Pahlavi, for Middle Persian, and the Avestan alphabet, for religious purposes.

In modern Persian script, short vowels (a, e, o) are usually not written; only the long vowels (i, u, â) are represented in the text. This creates certain ambiguities and the reader must determine the word from context. The Arabic system of vocalization marks known as harakat is also used in Persian, although some symbols have different pronunciations.

There are many letter that are normally used only in Arabic loan words. These letters are pronounced the same as similar Persian letters. For example, there are four functionally identical 'z' letters, three 's' letters, two 't' letters, etc.

Old Persian evolved from Proto-Iranian. The earliest dateable example of the language is the Behistun Inscription of the Achaemenid Darius I (r. 522 BC – ca. 486 BC). Old Persian was written in Old Persian cuneiform, a script unique to that language and is generally assumed to be an invention of Darius I's reign.

In contrast to Old Persian, written Middle Persian reflected oral form, and was therefore much simpler. The transition from Old to Middle Persian probably began before the 4th century. However, Middle Persian was not actually attested until 600 years later when it appeared in Sassanid era (224–651) inscriptions. As a literary language, Middle Persian was not attested until the 6th or 7th century. Since the 8th century, Middle Persian gradually gave way to New Persian, and the middle-period form only continued in the texts of Zoroastrian tradition.
Following the collapse of the Sassanid state, the term 'Parsik', the native name of Middle Persian, came to be applied to either Middle or New Persian that was written in Arabic script. From about the 9th century, as Middle Persian was about to become New Persian, the older form of the language came to be erroneously called 'Pahlavi', which was actually one of the writing systems used to render both Middle Persian as well as various other Middle Iranian languages. Pahlavi had previously been adopted by the Sassanids from the preceding Arsacids.

The history of New Persian itself spanned more than 1000-1200 years. The development of the language in its last period is often considered in three stages of early, classical, and contemporary periods. The Islamic conquest of Persia marks the beginning of the new history of Persian language and literature. Classic Persian was also the official and cultural language of many Islamic dynasties, including the Mughal Empire, Timurids, Ghaznavid, Seljuq, Ottomans, and many Mughal successor states such as the Nizams.

New Persian has had an influence on neighboring languages, especially the Turkic languages in Central Asia, Caucasus, Pashto, and Anatolia, and has influenced Urdu. It has also had a smaller influence on Hindi, Punjabi, Saraiki, and other South Asian languages, as well as Serbian and other Balkan languages. New Persian contains a considerable amount of Arabic lexical items, which were Persianized and often took a different meaning.

While Persian has a subject-object-verb (SOV) word order, it is not a strongly left-branching language like Japanese or Turkish. The main clause precedes a subordinate clause. The interrogative element, 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.

Persian nouns have no grammatical gender. They are marked 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. There are special rules for some nouns borrowed from Arabic.
Personal pronouns are optional in Persian. Pronouns generally are the same for all cases. Possession is often expressed by adding suffixes to nouns. They are added after inflection for number.

Adjectives typically follow the nouns they modify. However, adjectives can precede nouns in compounded derivational forms.

Information: Wikipedia