At the center of English lies another language—Persian, also known by its endonym, Farsi, by native speakers. While it may be simple to define, under the etymology lies a story of survival—a vestige of an ancient empire that has persisted through fragmentation and conquest to continue to be spoken to this day. There is a deep connection between Persian and Iranian pride; the language in its way is synonymous with Iranian identity. By exploring Persian’s history and character, a clearer picture emerges of the ties between a language and its people.
Business signs in Farsi on a street in Isfahan, Iran.
Persian is an ancient language, dating back 3000 years to the Achaemenid Dynasty in present-day Iran. With the rise and fall of each empire in the region, its written form evolved until the Muslim conquest in the late ninth century, at which point the language took on some Arabic words and, more notably, an adapted Arabic script to become the Persian used today.
This shared script, however, is where the similarities between Arabic and Persian end. Arabic is a Afroasiatic language, a member of the group of languages covering North Africa and the Middle East, while Persian is Indo-European, part of the family of languages covering South Asia and Europe. Ancient Persia’s wide vast borders have left the influence of the Persian language on many others, namely Hindi and Urdu, spoken primarily in India and Pakistan respectively. In fact, because of how many similarities it shared with nearby languages, Persian was considered the common language, or lingua franca, of South Asia up until a century ago.
Persian as spoken in Iran today is a simpler, more homogenized form of its ancient predecessor. Much like other Indo-Iranian languages, it has a subject-object-verb sentence structure, with adjectives following nouns; for example, rather than “Omid recites a beautiful poem,” the structure would be “Omid a poem beautiful recites.” Persian is also quite simple grammatically compared to other languages. Nouns and verbs are the same regardless of gender, and articles aren’t necessary. Plurality is denoted using suffixes and does not require changes in articles or verbs. To say it another way, Persian as a language is functional and uncomplicated by design.
Why then, has a grammatically practical and economical language like Persian been so deeply associated with poeticism? The answer may not be linguistic after all, but rather historical. In the 5th century, a collection of poems was written by Adbul-Qasem Ferdowsi called Shahnemeh, or the Book of Kings. It is fantastical and magical, with genies and serpent kings, but many Persians consider it to be one of the few accounts of Persian history before Islamic rule. When Persia fell to the Rashidun Caliphate in the 7th century and pressure mounted to integrate Arabic as the new national language, the desire to preserve knowledge of Shahnameh and Persian history kept the language alive. Without poetry, Persian would have long been lost. The language as we know it today owes its survival and foundation to poetry.
A page from an illustrated version of Shahnameh, created in 1493-4 in Gilan Province, North West Iran.
© The Trustees of the British Museum. (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).The language’s logical structure has also led to its preservation. Ancient Persian empires, namely the Sassanid kingdom, covered a vast amount of land with many different ethnogroups and cultures. Learning Persian was relatively quick and became one of the few characteristics that united these groups under a Persian identity, which remained during the Arab takeover. Without the language, the Persian identity would have split across tribal and cultural lines and the newly in-charge Rashidun Caliphate would have been left without a kingdom to control. To this day, most of the various tribal clans of the Sassanid kingdom consider themselves Persian, and the language was a major contributor to that nationalistic sentiment.
Persian has lasted millennia across other kingdoms, dynasties, and religions. It has united multiple groups and created a unique identity in the Middle East that is intentionally and defiantly not Arab. Persian identity is deeply tied to language. The character journeys in English are given additional weight as students are not just gaining a new language, but a new identity.
References
“A Guide to Persian – 10 Facts About the Persian Language.” BBC, 2014.
Admin. “The Poet Who Rescued Iranian Identity.” Talk Like a Persian, 13 Oct. 2020.
Ashraf, Ahmad. “Iranian Identity: i. Perspectives,” Encyclopaedia Iranica, 15 Dec. 2006.
Elemis. “Farsi Language History.” Renaissance Translations.
“Farsi/Persian/Dari.” University of Michigan Press.
Ghanbari, Hossein, and Mahdi Rahimian. “Persian Language Dominance and the Loss of Minority Languages in Iran.” Open Journal of Social Sciences, vol. 08, no. 11, Jan. 2020, pp. 8–18.
Learn Persian Online Team. “The Beauty of Persian: An Introduction for Beginners.” Learn Persian Online, 2023.
“Why Study Persian (Farsi)? | World Languages and Literatures.” Boston University, n.d.