Languages

Farsi

Farsi is the Arabic term for Persian. Farsi is the official language of Iran, which has close to 35 million native Farsi speakers. Farsi is also known as Western Persian or modern Iranian Persian. The history of the Persian language dates to the 6th century B.C., making it one of the oldest languages in existence.

Farsi dialects

Farsi has two main dialects, namely:

1. Western Farsi and
2. Eastern Farsi or Dari.

Tajik, (spoken mainly by natives of Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, which are the neighboring countries of Russia,) is considered by some to be a Farsi dialect.

Western Farsi is spoken in various countries in North America, Australia, Europe, the Middle East and on the Indian subcontinent as well as in Iran. There are around 100 million Farsi speakers in the world.

On the other hand, Eastern Farsi or Dari is the official language of Afghanistan and is also spoken in some parts of Iran and Pakistan. This dialect is used by almost 10 million Eastern Farsi speakers in Afghanistan, which is almost 90% of the total global Eastern Farsi speaking population. This is the reason why this dialect is also called Afghan Farsi.

Some features of the Farsi language

Farsi is a branch of the Iranian division of the Indo-European language family. Farsi is mainly influenced by Arabic and also, to a lesser extent, by the French, German, Turkic and English languages. Languages that have borrowed words from Farsi include Hindi, Urdu, Telugu, Malay, and Georgian, among others.

Farsi script is derived from the Arabic script. Like Arabic it is written from right to left. In Farsi there are four more letters than in Arabic, which are pronounced as “pe, ce, ze and g”. When writing some Arabic letters in Farsi, script marks including dots, dashes and shapes resembling small circles, among others, are used to distinguish these Arabic letters from Farsi letters.

There are seven letters in the Farsi alphabet that cannot be used in combination with other letters. These letters are written alone in Farsi script. But all of the other letters in Farsi script are connected to each other to form words and sentences. In Farsi, new words are created by combining two existing words. These words can be nouns, adjectives and verbs.

There are 3 long vowels and 3 short vowels in Farsi. Long vowels are for the most part only used in written Farsi. Vowels in Farsi differ according to dialect. Verbs in Farsi are conjugated using prefixes and suffixes in order to denote tense. In Farsi, nouns do not have gender.