The Persian Language

Persian belongs to the Iranian branch of the Indo-European family, a sibling of Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, and English. The three branches of historical Persian — Old, Middle, and New — represent an unbroken lineage of more than thirty centuries. Modern speakers of Tehrani Persian can read Ferdowsi's thousand-year-old verse with greater ease than an English-speaker can read Chaucer.

Centuries of trade along the Silk Road and the Spice Route brought Persian vocabulary into European languages — sometimes via Arabic, Turkish, or Hindi. Many English words are recognisable Persian in light disguise.

For half a millennium, from roughly 1100 to 1700, Persian was the language of high culture, administration and poetry across an enormous arc — from the Bosphorus to the Bay of Bengal. Its vocabulary travelled with merchants, soldiers, mystics and bureaucrats into every language it touched. Even after the political retreat of Persian, those layers remained.

New Persian is written in a modified Arabic alphabet of 32 letters, including four characters (پ چ ژ گ) that do not exist in Arabic and were added to represent specifically Persian sounds. The script is written right-to-left; vowels are usually unwritten in adult prose but appear in poetry, dictionaries, and children's books as small marks above and below the line. Classical Persian calligraphy — especially the flowing Nastaʿlīq script developed in 14th-century Tabriz — is itself a national art form.