| Iranian Persian | |
|---|---|
| Western Persian | |
| فارسی (Fārsi) | |
 Fārsi written inPersian calligraphy (Nastaʿlīq) | |
| Pronunciation | [fɒːɾˈsiː] |
| Native to | Iran |
| Region | West Asia |
| Ethnicity | Persians |
| Speakers | L1: 65 million (2023)[1] L2: 17 million (2021)[1] Total: 83 million (2021–2023)[1] |
| Dialects | Bushehri Abadani Araki Bandari Basseri Esfahani Karbalai Kashani Kermani Kermanshahi Kuwaiti Mashhadi Qazvini Shirazi Sistani Tehrani Yazdi |
| Perso-Arabic script | |
| Official status | |
Official language in | Iran |
| Regulated by | Academy of Persian Language and Literature |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | pes |
| Glottolog | west2369 |
| This article containsIPA phonetic symbols. Without properrendering support, you may seequestion marks, boxes, or other symbols instead ofUnicode characters. For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, seeHelp:IPA. | |
Iranian Persian (Persian:فارسی ایرانی,romanized: Fârsi-ye Irâni),[2][3]Western Persian[4] orWestern Farsi,[5] is thevariety of thePersian language spoken inIran and by others in neighboring countries, as well as byIranian communities throughout the world. These are intelligible with other varieties ofPersian, includingAfghanistan'sDari andTajikistan'sTajik.[1] When contrasted with Dari and Tajik, it is often simply referred to asFarsi (Persian:فارسی,romanized: Fârsi).
Iranian Persian serves as the predominant and official spoken language in Iran, with 61.5 million mother tongue speakers in 2023 and 17.2 million second language speakers in 2021.[6]
Iran's national language has been called, apart fromPersian orFarsi, by names such asIranian Persian,Western Persian andWestern Farsi, exclusively.[7][8] Officially, the national language of Iran is designated simply asPersian (فارسی,fārsi).[9]
The international language-encoding standardISO 639-1 uses the codefa for the Persian language in general, as its coding system is mostly based on the native-language designations. The more detailed standardISO 639-3 uses the codefas for the dialects spoken across Iran and Afghanistan. This consists of the individual languages Dari and Iranian Persian.[3] The codepes is used for Iranian Persian, exclusively.
On November 19, 2005, theAcademy of Persian Language and Literature delivered a pronouncement on the name of the Persian language, rejecting any use of the wordFarsi (instead of EnglishPersian, GermanPersisch, Spanishpersa, Frenchpersan, etc.) in foreign languages.
The announcement reads:
Supporting this announcement, gradually other institutions and literary figures separately took similar actions throughout the world.[10][11][12][13]
The main dynamics of the linguistic evolution of modern Persian are political and social changes such as population shifts, the advancement of particular regions, and the rise of ideological influences. In Iran, theSafavid period in particular initiated a number of sociolinguistic changes that affected the country's national language, reflecting the political and ideological separation of Iran from Central Asia and Afghanistan. It is likely that the multiple relocations of thecapital city of Iran itself influenced the development of a distinctive metropolitan sociolect that would affect Persian dialects throughout the country.[4]
During the late 12th and late 15th or early 17th centuries in Iran, the vowel repertory of the Persian language was reduced and a few consonants were altered in most of Iran's Western Persian dialects, while these features have been predominantly preserved in the Eastern dialects of Dari and Tajik up until the present day.[4]
From the time of the Turco-Mongol invasions to the Safavid and subsequent Turkic-speaking dynasties, Persian received a number of lexical borrowings from Turkish, although never as much as those from Arabic. However, in contrast with the Tajik dialects of Central Asia, which are heavily influenced by Turkic, Persian in Iran has had its Turkic borrowings largely declined and assimilated. This is also reflective of the political realities in the Safavid, Qajar and Pahlavi periods.[4]
Overall, Iran's Western Persian dialects appear to have changed more rapidly in lexicon and phonology than the Eastern Persian dialects of Afghanistan and Central Asia.[4]
There are phonological, lexical,[14] and morphological[15] differences between the Persian dialects of Iran and elsewhere. There are no significant differences in the written forms of Iran's standard Persian and Afghanistan's standard Dari, other than regional idiomatic phrases. However, Iran's commonly spoken Persian is considerably different in pronunciation and some syntactic features from the dialects spoken in Afghanistan and Central Asia.[16]
The dialects of Dari spoken in Northern, Central and Eastern Afghanistan, for example inKabul,Mazar, andBadakhshan, have distinct features compared to Iran's Standard Persian. However, the dialect of Dari spoken in Western Afghanistan stands in between Dari and Iranian Persian. For instance, the Herati dialect shares vocabulary and phonology with both Dari and Iranian Persian. Likewise, the dialect of Persian in Eastern Iran, for instance inMashhad, is quite similar to the Herati dialect of Afghanistan.
TheKabuli dialect has become the standard model of Dari in Afghanistan, as has theTehrani dialect in relation to the Persian in Iran.
The following are the primary phonological differences between Iran's mainstream Persian and the Persian dialects of Afghanistan and Tajikistan (Dari and Tajik), as well as Classical Persian.
