Persian People - Language

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.