Farsi (Persian) (/ˈpɜːrʒən/ or /ˈpɜːrʃən/), also known by its endonym Farsi (فارسی fārsi [fɒːɾˈsiː] (About this sound listen)), is one of the Western Iranian languages within the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European language family. It is primarily spoken in Iran, Afghanistan (officially known as Dari since 1958),[8] and Tajikistan (officially known as Tajiki since the Soviet era),[9] and some other regions which historically were Persianate societies and considered part of Greater Iran. It is written in the Persian alphabet, a modified variant of the Arabic script.
The Persian language is classified as a continuation of Middle Persian, the official religious and literary language of the Sasanian Empire, itself a continuation of Old Persian, the language of the Achaemenid Empire.[10][11][12] Its grammar is similar to that of many contemporary European languages.[13] Persian gets its name from its origin at the capital of the Achaemenid Empire, Persis (modern-day Fars Province), hence the name Persian (Farsi).[14] A Persian-speaking person may be referred to as Persophone.[15]
There are approximately 110 million Persian speakers worldwide, with the language holding official status in Iran, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan. For centuries, Persian has also been a prestigious cultural language in other regions of Western Asia, Central Asia, and South Asia by the various empires based in the regions.[16]
Persian has had a considerable (mainly lexical) influence on neighboring languages, particularly the Turkic languages in Central Asia, Caucasus, and Anatolia, neighboring Iranian languages, as well as Armenian, Georgian, and Indo-Aryan languages, especially Urdu (a register of Hindustani). It also exerted some influence on Arabic, particularly Bahrani Arabic,[17] while borrowing much vocabulary from it after the Arab conquest of Iran.[10][13][18][19][20][21][22]
With a long history of literature in the form of Middle Persian before Islam, Persian was the first language in the Muslim world to break through Arabic's monopoly on writing, and the writing of poetry in Persian was established as a court tradition in many eastern courts.[16] Some of the famous works of Persian literature are the Shahnameh of Ferdowsi, the works of Rumi, the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, the Panj Ganj of Nizami Ganjavi, the Divān of Hafez and the two miscellanea of prose and verse by Saadi Shirazi, the Gulistan and the Bustan.