Languages
Native
Persian (Farsi)
53%
Azerbaijani
18%
Language Samples
سلام، حال شما چطور است؟
Salâm, hâl-e shomâ chetour ast?
Hello, how are you?
حالم خوب است، ممنون.
Hâlam khub ast, mamnun.
I am well, thank you.
یک، دو، سه، چهار، پنج، شش، هفت، هشت، نه، ده
Yek, do, se, chahâr, panj, shesh, haft, hasht, noh, dah
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten.
Linguistic History
Persian (Farsi) is one of the great classical languages of world literature, with an unbroken written tradition stretching back over 2,500 years. It belongs to the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European family. After the Arab conquest of Persia in the 7th century, Persian adopted the Arabic script and absorbed a large Arabic vocabulary, but retained its distinct grammar and core vocabulary. Persian served as the prestige language of the Islamic world for centuries, functioning as the language of literature, science, and administration from Ottoman Turkey to Mughal India. Today it is the official language of Iran, and closely related varieties — Dari and Tajik — are official in Afghanistan and Tajikistan respectively.
Similar Languages
Dari (Afghan Persian)
90%
Tajik
85%
Kurdish
40%
Urdu (loanwords)
35%
Media
Persepolis, the ancient ceremonial capital of the Achaemenid Empire, where Old Persian cuneiform inscriptions document one of the earliest forms of the Persian language.
Photo: Carole Raddato · CC BY-SA 2.0
Did You Know
01
Persian has no grammatical gender — unlike French, Spanish, or Arabic, there is no masculine/feminine distinction for nouns, pronouns, or adjectives.
02
The Persian poet Ferdowsi deliberately avoided Arabic loanwords when writing the Shahnameh (Book of Kings) around 1000 CE, and the epic is credited with preserving the Persian language through a period of heavy Arabic influence.
03
Persian is written right-to-left in a modified Arabic script, but Persian uses four letters not found in Arabic (پ, چ, ژ, گ) to represent sounds absent from Arabic phonology.