Persian language

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Persian (local names: Persian: فارسی IPA: [fɒːrˈsi] (Farsi) or Persian: پارسی IPA: [pɒːrˈsi] (Parsi); see Nomenclature), is an Iranian language within the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European languages. It is a language spoken by the Persian people, but due to the wide reach of the old Persian empire, it is spoken not just in Iran, but also in Afghanistan and Tajikistan; it has official-language status in these three countries.

The Persian language has been a medium for literary and scientific contributions to the Islamic world as well as the Western. It has had an influence on certain neighbouring languages, particularly the Turkic languages of Central Asia, Caucasus, and Anatolia as well as Urdu, Hindi,Saraiki and other Indian languages. It has had a lesser influence on Arabic and other languages of Mesopotamia.

For five centuries prior to the British colonization, Persian was widely used as a second language in the Indian subcontinent; it took prominence as the language of culture and education in several Muslim courts in South Asia and became the “official language” under the Mughal emperors. Only in 1843 did the subcontinent begin conducting business in English.^[3] Evidence of Persian’s historical influence there can be seen in the extent of its influence on the languages of the Indian subcontinent, as well as the popularity that Persian literature still enjoys in that region.

Perso-Arabic script

The Perso-Arabic script is a writing system that is based on the Arabic alphabet. Originally used exclusively for the Arabic language, the Arabic script was modified to match the demands of being a writing system for the Persian language, adding four letters: پ [p], چ [ʧ], ژ [ʒ], and گ [g]. Many languages which use the Perso-Arabic script add additional letters. The Perso-Arabic script has been applied, beside the Persian alphabet itself, to the Urdu alphabet,Saraiki alphabet, , Kurdish Sorani alphabet ,Lurish (Luri), Ottoman Turkish alphabet, Balochi alphabet, Punjabi Shahmukhi script, Tatar, Azeri, and several others.

In order to represent non-Arabic sounds, new letters were created by adding dots, lines, and other shapes to existing letters. For example, the retroflex sounds of Urdu are represented orthographically by adding a small ط above their non-retroflex counterparts: د [d̪] and ڈ [ɖ]. The voiceless retroflex fricative [ʂ] of Pashto is represented in writing by adding a dot above and below the س [s] letter, resulting in ښ. The close central rounded vowel [ʉ] of Kurdish is written by writing two ﻭ [u], resulting in ﻭﻭ.

The Perso-Arabic script is exclusively written cursively. That is, the majority of letters in a word connect to each other. This is also implemented on computers. Whenever the Perso-Arabic script is typed, the computer connects the letters to each other. Unconnected letters are not widely accepted. In Perso-Arabic, as in Arabic, words are written from right to left while numbers are written from left to right.

There are many Arabic-derived alphabets which were not influenced by the Perso-Arabic script, including Jawi (used for Malay), Sorabe (Malagasy), and many alphabets used in Northern Africa. These alphabets used other innovations for writing such common sounds as [p] and [g], instead of the Perso-Arabic letters پ and گ, although the Jawi script does use the same symbol for [ʧ] ( چ ).

A characteristic feature of this script, possibly tracing back to Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, is that vowels are underrepresented. For example, in Classical Arabic, of the six vowels, the three short ones are normally omitted entirely (except in the Qur’an), while the three long ones are represented ambiguously by certain consonants. Only Kashmiri, Uyghur and Kurdish, of the many languages using adaptations of this script, regularly indicate all vowels.

Fārsi (local name for Persian) in Perso-Arabic script (Nasta‘liq style):
Pronunciation:	[fɒːrˈsi]
Spoken in:	Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Bahrain. Also in various Iranian, Afghan, Uzbekistani, and Tajikistani diaspora communities in the USA, Pakistan, Russia, Germany, Canada, Turkmenistan, France, Spain, Sweden, UAE, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, India, Israel, Brazil and Turkey.
Region:	Middle East, Central Asia
Total speakers:	ca. 56,000,000 native (2006 estimates)[1]
Ranking:	22nd (native speakers) [2]
Language family:	Indo-European Indo-Iranian Iranian Western Iranian Southwestern Iranian Persian
Official status
Official language in:	Iran Afghanistan Tajikistan
Regulated by:	Academy of Persian Language and Literature Academy of Sciences of Afghanistan
Language codes
ISO 639-1:	fa
ISO 639-2:	per (B)	fas (T)
ISO 639-3:	variously: fas – Persian prs – Eastern Persian pes – Western Persian tgk – Tajik aiq – Aimaq bhh – Bukharic deh – Dehwari drw – Darwazi haz – Hazaragi jpr – Dzhidi phv – Pahlavani