Persian is a member of the Western Iranian group of the Iranian languages, which make up a branch of the Indo-European languages in their Indo-Iranian subdivision. The Western Iranian languages themselves are divided into two subgroups: Southwestern Iranian languages, of which Persian is the most widely spoken, and Northwestern Iranian languages, of which Kurdish and Balochi are the most ...
Persian, predominant ethnic group of Iran (formerly known as Persia). Although of diverse ancestry, the Persian people are united by their language, Persian (Farsi), which belongs to the Indo-Iranian group of the Indo-European language family. (Dari, a variant of the Persian language, is the lingua franca and an official language of Afghanistan and is also spoken in Pakistan.)
Persian evokes an ancient civilization known for its empires, literature and artistic traditions. It refers to a specific cultural and ethnic heritage that has influenced much of the Iranian world.
Then Persian language became the official language and the poets such as Rudaki and Ferdowshi had an important role in reviving the language. Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh is the most popular and influential national epic in Iran and other Persian-speaking nations. The Persians regard Ferdowsi as the greatest of their poets.
Ancient Persian culture flourished between the reign of Cyrus II (The Great, r. c. 550-530 BCE), founder of the Achaemenid Persian Empire, and the fall of the Sassanian Empire in 651 CE. Even so, the...
Persian Background An Introduction to the Persian Language By Narguess Farzad Persian is one of the oldest living languages of the world and one of the few whose millennium-old prose and poetry is perfectly understood by its modern native speakers and by those who learn it properly as a second language. Persian is an Indo-European