Language
The Persian language is one of the world's oldest languages still in use today, and is known to have one of the most powerful literary traditions, with formidable Persian poets like Ferdowsi, Hafiz, Khayyam, Attar, Saadi, Nizami, Roudaki, Rumi and Sanai. By native speakers it eventually came to be known as Fārsī, which was the Arabic form of Parsi as there is no "P" sound in Arabic. Additionally, Persian was constitutionally renamed from Farsi to Dari in Afghanistan during the 1960s for political reasons. The dialect of Persian spoken in Tajikistan is called Tajiki.
"Persian" has historically referred to some Iranian languages, however what today is referred to as the Persian language is part of the Western group of the Iranian languages branch of the Indo-European language family. Today, speakers of the western dialect of Persian form the majority in Iran. The eastern dialect, also called Dari or Tajiki, forms majorities in Tajikistan, and Afghanistan, and a large minority in Uzbekistan. Smaller groups of Persian-speakers are found in Iraq, Russia, Pakistan (by Hazaras in Balochistan), western China (Xinjiang), as well as in the UAE, Bahrain, Sweden, Kuwait, Oman, Georgia and Azerbaijan.
Read more about this topic: Persian People
Famous quotes containing the word language:
“The language of Friendship is not words, but meanings. It is an intelligence above language.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Public speaking is done in the public tongue, the national or tribal language; and the language of our tribe is the men’s language. Of course women learn it. We’re not dumb. If you can tell Margaret Thatcher from Ronald Reagan, or Indira Gandhi from General Somoza, by anything they say, tell me how. This is a man’s world, so it talks a man’s language.”
—Ursula K. Le Guin (b. 1929)
“Any language is necessarily a finite system applied with different degrees of creativity to an infinite variety of situations, and most of the words and phrases we use are “prefabricated” in the sense that we don’t coin new ones every time we speak.”
—David Lodge (b. 1935)