The Persian language

The New Persian language (common name: Persian; endonym: Farsi) belongs to the Indo-European language family. The number of its speakers is approximately 110 million, and 70 million people use it as their first mother tongue, mostly in Iran and neighbouring countries. The official language of Tajikistan (Tajik) and one of the official languages ​​of Afghanistan (Dari) are the descendants of classical Persian, specific local dialects. Although the speakers of the three languages ​​can understand each other, as the official languages ​​of independent political formations, they are considered to be separate languages.

The New Persian language is written in a modified Arabic alphabet. Words are written from right to left, but numbers are written from left to right. The interpretation of the writing is complicated by the fact that vowels are only partially marked.

The Persian language has undergone significant changes since the Islamic conquest, it can be witnessed in the number of Arabic borrowings too which can reach 50-60% depending on the style and topic. Regardless, despite the common misconception, Persian and Arabic are not related to each other, there is no mutual understanding between their speakers.

There are a lot of quotes about language learning: a new language opens a new window, gives a second soul, etc; about Persian it is certainly true: speaking Persian is the way to the heart of 110 million people, to the ancient Iranian culture, to the ability of reading the world-famous classical Persian poetry such as Ferdowsi, Rumi or Hafez.