Modern Persian

New Persian (), also known as Modern Persian () is the current stage of the Persian language spoken since the 8th to 9th centuries until now in Greater Iran and surroundings. It is conventionally divided into three stages: Early New Persian (8th/9th centuries), Classical Persian (10th–18th centuries), and Contemporary Persian (19th century to present).

Dari is a name given to the New Persian language since the 10th century, widely used in Arabic (see Istakhri, al-Maqdisi and ibn Hawqal) and Persian texts. Since 1964, Dari has been the official name in Afghanistan for the Persian spoken there.

Classification

New Persian is a member of the Western Iranian group of the Iranian languages, which make up a branch of the Indo-European languages in their Indo-Iranian subdivision.

The Western Iranian languages themselves are divided into two subgroups: Southwestern Iranian languages, of which Persian is the most widely spoken, and Northwestern Iranian languages, of which Kurdish is the most widely spoken.

Etymology

"New Persian" is the name given to the final stage of development of Persian language. The term ''Persian'' is an English derivation of Latin , the adjectival form of , itself deriving from Greek (), a Hellenized form of Old Persian (), which means "Persia" (a region in southwestern Iran corresponding to modern-day Fars province). According to the ''Oxford English Dictionary'', the term ''Persian'' as a language name is first attested in English in the mid-16th century.

There are different opinions about the origin of the word ''Dari''. The majority of scholars believes ''Dari'' refers to the Persian word ''dar'' or ''darbār'' "court" () as it was the formal language of the Sasanian dynasty.Lazard, G. '
Darī – The New Persian Literary Language
'', in Encyclopædia Iranica, Online Edition 2006. The original meaning of the word ''dari'' is given in a notice attributed to Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ (cited by Ibn al-Nadim in '' Al-Fehrest''). According to him, "''Pārsī'' was the language spoken by priests, scholars, and the like; it is the language of Fars." This language refers to the Middle Persian. As for ''Dari'', he says, "it is the language of the cities of Madā'en; it is spoken by those who are at the king's court. ts nameis connected with presence at court. Among the languages of the people of Khorasan and the east, the language of the people of Balkh is predominant."

History

New Persian is conventionally divided into three stages:
*Early New Persian (8th/9th centuries)
*Classical Persian (10th–18th centuries)
*Contemporary Persian (19th century to present)

Early New Persian remains largely intelligible to speakers of Contemporary Persian, as the morphology and, to a lesser extent, the lexicon of the language have remained relatively stable.

Early New Persian

New Persian texts written in the Arabic script first appear in the 9th-century. The language is a direct descendant of Middle Persian, the official, religious and literary language of the Sasanian Empire (224–651). However, it is not descended from the literary form of Middle Persian (known as ''pārsīk'', commonly called Pahlavi), which was spoken by the people of Fars and used in Zoroastrian religious writings. Instead, it is descended from the dialect spoken by the court of the Sasanian capital Ctesiphon and the northeastern Iranian region of Khorasan, known as Dari. Khorasan, which was the homeland of the Parthians, was Persianized under the Sasanians. Dari Persian thus supplanted the Parthian language, which by the end of the Sasanian era had fallen out of use. New Persian has incorporated many foreign words, including from eastern northern and northern Iranian languages such as Sogdian and especially Parthian.

The mastery of the newer speech having now been transformed from Middle into New Persian was already complete by the era of the three princely dynasties of Iranian origin, the Tahirid dynasty (820–872), Saffarid dynasty (860–903) and Samanid Empire (874–999), and could develop only in range and power of expression.Jackson, A. V. Williams. 1920. Early Persian poetry, from the beginnings down to the time of Firdausi. New York: The Macmillan Company. pp.17–19. (i
Public Domain
Abbas of Merv is mentioned as being the earliest minstrel to chant verse in the newer Persian tongue and after him the poems of Hanzala Badghisi were among the most famous between the Persian-speakers of the time.

The first poems of the Persian language, a language historically called Dari, emerged in Afghanistan. The first significant Persian poet was Rudaki. He flourished in the 10th century, when the Samanids were at the height of their power. His reputation as a court poet and as an accomplished musician and singer has survived, although little of his poetry has been preserved. Among his lost works are versified fables collected in the '' Kalila wa Dimna''.

The language spread geographically from the 11th century on and was the medium through which among others, Central Asian Turks became familiar with Islam and urban culture. New Persian was widely used as a trans-regional lingua franca, a task for which it was particularly suitable due to its relatively simple morphological structure and this situation persisted until at least the 19th century.Johanson, Lars, and Christiane Bulut. 2006
Turkic-Iranian contact areas: historical and linguistic aspects
Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. In the late Middle Ages, new Islamic literary languages were created on the Persian model: Ottoman Turkish, Chagatai, Dobhashi and Urdu, which are regarded as "structural daughter languages" of Persian.

Classical Persian

"Classical Persian" loosely refers to the standardized language of medieval Persia used in literature and poetry.
This is the language of the 10th to 12th centuries, which continued to be used as literary language and lingua franca under the " Persianized" Turko-Mongol dynasties during the 12th to 15th centuries, and under restored Persian rule during the 16th to 19th centuries.

Persian during this time served as lingua franca of Greater Persia and of much of the Indian subcontinent.
It was also the official and cultural language of many Islamic dynasties, including the Samanids, Buyids, Tahirids, Ziyarids, the Mughal Empire, Timurids, Ghaznavids, Karakhanids, Seljuqs, Khwarazmians, the Sultanate of Rum, Delhi Sultanate, the Shirvanshahs, Safavids, Afsharids, Zands, Qajars, Khanate of Bukhara, Khanate of Kokand, Emirate of Bukhara, Khanate of Khiva, Ottomans and also many Mughal successors such as the Nizam of Hyderabad.
Persian was the only non-European language known and used by Marco Polo at the Court of Kublai Khan and in his journeys through China.

Contemporary Persian

; Qajar dynasty
In the 19th century, under the Qajar dynasty, the dialect that is spoken in Tehran rose to prominence. There was still substantial Arabic vocabulary, but many of these words have been integrated into Persian phonology and grammar. In addition, under the Qajar rule numerous Russian, French, and English terms entered the Persian language, especially vocabulary related to technology.

The first official attentions to the necessity of protecting the Persian language against foreign words, and to the standardization of Persian orthography, were under the reign of Naser ed Din Shah of the Qajar dynasty in 1871. After Naser ed Din Shah, Mozaffar ed Din Shah ordered the establishment of the first Persian association in 1903. This association officially declared that it used Persian and Arabic as acceptable sources for coining words. The ultimate goal was to prevent books from being printed with wrong use of words. According to the executive guarantee of this association, the government was responsible for wrongfully printed books. Words coined by this association, such as ''rāh-āhan'' () for "railway", were printed in ''Soltani Newspaper''; but the association was eventually closed due to inattention.

A scientific association was founded in 1911, resulting in a dictionary called ''Words of Scientific Association'' (), which was completed in the future and renamed ''Katouzian Dictionary'' ().

; Pahlavi dynasty

The first academy for the Persian language was founded on 20 May 1935, under the name ''Academy of Iran''. It was established by the initiative of Reza Shah Pahlavi, and mainly by Hekmat e Shirazi and Mohammad Ali Foroughi, all prominent names in the nationalist movement of the time.
The academy was a key institution in the struggle to re-build Iran as a nation-state after the collapse of the Qajar dynasty. During the 1930s and 1940s, the academy led massive campaigns to replace the many Arabic, Russian, French, and Greek loanwords whose widespread use in Persian during the centuries preceding the foundation of the Pahlavi dynasty had created a literary language considerably different from the spoken Persian of the time. This became the basis of what is now known as "Contemporary Standard Persian".

Varieties

There are three standard varieties of modern Persian:
*''Western Persian'' (''Persian'', ''Western Persian'', or ''Farsi'') is spoken in Iran, and by minorities in Iraq and the Persian Gulf states.
*'' Eastern Persian'' (''Dari Persian'', ''Afghan Persian'', or ''Dari'') is spoken in Afghanistan.
*''Tajiki'' (''Tajik Persian'') is spoken in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. It is written in the Cyrillic script.

All these three varieties are based on the classic Persian literature and its literary tradition. There are also several local dialects from Iran, Afghanistan and Tajikistan which slightly differ from the standard Persian. The Hazaragi dialect (in Central Afghanistan and Pakistan), Herati (in Western Afghanistan), Darwazi (in Afghanistan and Tajikistan), Basseri (in Southern Iran), and the Tehrani accent (in Iran, the basis of standard Iranian Persian) are examples of these dialects. Persian-speaking peoples of Iran, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan can understand one another with a relatively high degree of mutual intelligibility. Nevertheless, the ''Encyclopædia Iranica'' notes that the Iranian, Afghan and Tajiki varieties comprise distinct branches of the Persian language, and within each branch a wide variety of local dialects exist.

The following are some languages closely related to Persian, or in some cases are considered dialects:
* Luri (or ''Lori''), spoken mainly in the southwestern Iranian provinces of Lorestan, Kohgiluyeh and Boyer-Ahmad, Chaharmahal and Bakhtiari some western parts of Fars province and some parts of Khuzestan province.
* Tat, spoken in parts of Azerbaijan, Russia, and Transcaucasia. It is classified as a variety of Persian.Gernot Windfuhr, "Persian Grammar: history and state of its study", Walter de Gruyter, 1979. pg 4:""Tat- Persian spoken in the East Caucasus"" (This dialect is not to be confused with the Tati language of northwestern Iran, which is a member of a different branch of the Iranian languages.)
*Judeo-Tat. Part of the Tat-Persian continuum, spoken in Azerbaijan, Russia, as well as by immigrant communities in Israel and New York.

Standard Persian

Standard Persian is the standard variety of Persian that is the official language of the IranConstitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran: Chapter II, Article 15: "The official language and script of Iran, the lingua franca of its people, is Persian. Official documents, correspondence, and texts, as well as text-books, must be in this language and script. However, the use of regional and tribal languages in the press and mass media, as well as for teaching of their literature in schools, is allowed in addition to Persian." and Tajikistan and one of the two official languages of Afghanistan. It is a set of spoken and written formal varieties used by the educated persophones of several nations around the world.

As Persian is a pluricentric language, Standard Persian encompasses various linguistic norms (consisting of prescribed usage). Standard Persian practically has three standard varieties with official status in Iran, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan. The standard forms of the three are based on the Tehrani, Kabuli, and Bukharan varieties, respectively.

See also

* History of the Persian language
* Old Persian
* Middle Persian

References

Sources

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External links

Academy of Persian Language and Literature official website


Assembly for the Expansion of the Persian Language official website


Persian language Resources

{{Persian language

Persian language
History of the Persian language
Persian