What is Farsi?
Farsi is the modern Persian language of Iran — the endonym Farsi and the exonym Persian are synonyms, and the choice between them is mostly a matter of register. Spoken as a first language by more than 70 million people in Iran and as a second language by millions more in the diaspora, Farsi is one of the great literary languages of the Islamic world and the direct descendant of the classical Persian of the Samanid, Ghaznavid, Seljuk, Timurid, and Safavid courts. The long-tail page on what language the ancient Persians spoke treats the historical background of the language in more detail.
The meaning of the word Farsi
The word Farsi is the modern endonym for the Persian language in Iran, derived from the Arabic Fārsī, which is in turn derived from the Arabic name Fārs for the Persian province of Fars, the homeland of the Achaemenid and Sasanian dynasties. The province of Fars gave its name to the Persian people, the Fārsī, the Fārisī, the Farsi, the Farsi-ye zaban, the language of Fars. The form Farsi, with the initial F, is the most common in modern English usage.
The word Persian is the exonym of European origin, derived from the Latin Persia, the Greek Persis, the Old Persian Pārsa, the name of the region of Persis, the heartland of the Achaemenid Empire. The words Farsi and Persian are synonyms, and the choice of one or the other is largely a matter of political or cultural preference. Farsi is the most common term in the diaspora and in modern English-language usage; Persian is the most common term in the academic and the historical literature. Persianate, the adjective, is the working term in art history and cultural history for the broader cultural zone that the language defines.
Farsi, Dari, and Tajik
The modern Persian language is conventionally divided into three major varieties: Farsi, the language of Iran; Dari, the language of Afghanistan; and Tajik, the language of Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. The three varieties are mutually intelligible to a very high degree, and the differences are largely phonological, lexical, and in the case of Tajik, orthographic. Farsi, Dari, and Tajik are conventionally considered dialects of a single language, Persian, rather than separate languages, and the speakers of the three varieties can communicate with little or no difficulty.
Farsi, the language of Iran, is the most widely spoken variety, with more than 70 million native speakers, and is the standard language of Iranian literature, education, and media. The standard pronunciation of Farsi is the Tehran accent, although the older and more conservative pronunciations of Isfahan, Shiraz, and Yazd are widely respected. The modern Farsi literary tradition, which includes the novels of Sadegh Hedayat, the poetry of Ahmad Shamlou and Forough Farrokhzad, the films of Abbas Kiarostami, and the music of Mohammad Reza Shajarian, is one of the most distinguished of the contemporary Islamic world.
Dari, the language of Afghanistan, is the prestige variety of Persian in Afghanistan, the language of the court and the literary tradition, and is closely related to the classical Persian of the Timurid and Mughal courts. The two major dialects of Dari are the Kabuli, the prestige variety, and the Hazaragi, the variety spoken by the Hazara people of central Afghanistan. The Afghan literary tradition, which includes the poetry of Rahman Baba and Khalilullah Khalili, is part of the broader Persian literary world.
Tajik, the language of Tajikistan, is the easternmost variety of Persian, and the speakers of Tajik are descended from the Sogdians, Bactrians, and other eastern Iranian peoples who, like the western Iranians, adopted the New Persian language of the Samanid period. The Tajik literary tradition, in classical and modern times, includes the poetry of Rudaki, Ferdowsi (whose family was from the Samanid domains of Khorasan and Transoxiana), the Timurid poets of Herat, and the modern poets of Dushanbe and Samarkand. Tajik is written in a Cyrillic alphabet, in part a legacy of the Soviet period, although there has been a movement to restore the Arabic-based script.
The vocabulary of Farsi
The vocabulary of Farsi is, in the modern language, approximately 60% native Persian and 40% Arabic, with smaller borrowings from Turkish, French, Russian, and English. The native Persian vocabulary, the fath-e buni, includes the basic words of the language — ruz, the day; shab, the night; dast, the hand; pa, the foot; del, the heart; sara, the head; chashm, the eye; gosh, the ear — and the most ancient vocabulary of the language, which descends from Old Persian and Middle Persian. The Arabic vocabulary, the arabi, includes the religious, philosophical, scientific, and administrative terms — kitab, the book; qalam, the pen; dars, the lesson; masjid, the mosque; iman, the faith — that entered the language with the Arab conquest and the rise of Islam.
The relationship between the native Persian vocabulary and the Arabic borrowings is one of the central themes of the Persian literary tradition, and the farsi and the arabi are often invoked in the ghazal and the qasida of the classical poets. The farsi-e sarf, the pure Persian, the attempt to replace the Arabic borrowings with native Persian equivalents, was a major movement of the twentieth century, but the movement did not succeed in replacing the Arabic vocabulary, and the modern Farsi language continues to use both lexicons.
The vocabulary of Farsi also includes borrowings from the languages of the peoples with whom the Iranian world has been in contact, including Greek, Turkish, Mongol, French, Russian, and English. The Greek borrowings, the Yunani, include the terms that entered Persian through the Hellenistic period. The Turkish borrowings, the Torki, include the military, administrative, and political terms that entered Persian through the Seljuk, Ilkhanid, and Timurid periods. The French and English borrowings, the Faransi and the Engilisi, include the modern technical and scientific terms that entered Persian in the Pahlavi and Islamic Republic periods.
The script of Farsi
Farsi is written in a modified Arabic script, a consonantal alphabet with a small set of vowel diacritics, that was adopted gradually in the ninth and tenth centuries. The Arabic script, with its cursive style, is written from right to left, and the naskh and nasta’liq styles are the most common in Persian. The nasta’liq style, developed in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, is particularly associated with Persian poetry, and the great calligraphies of the Shahnameh, the Divan of Hafez, and the Masnavi of Rumi are among the most beautiful works of Persian calligraphy.
The Arabic script was adapted to the phonology of Persian by adding four letters — pe for /p/, che for /ch/, ze for /zh/, and gaf for /g/ — that were not present in Arabic, and by adding vowel diacritics — zebar, zir, and pish — to represent the short vowels /a/, /e/, and /o/. The result is a script that can be read by any speaker of Arabic but that represents, with a few additional conventions, the full phonology of Persian. The script is also used for the other Persian languages, including Dari (where the script is the same as in Iran) and Tajik (where the Cyrillic alphabet is also used).
The modern Farsi literary tradition
The modern Farsi literary tradition begins in the late nineteenth century, with the Constitutional Revolution of 1905–1911, and continues through the twentieth century to the present. The early modern poets — Iraj, Bahar, Nima Yushij, and Ahmad Shamlou — experimented with the classical forms and developed new modes of poetic expression. The novel, introduced to Persian in the early twentieth century, became a major literary form in the works of Sadegh Hedayat, Bozorg Alavi, Sadeq Chubak, and Simin Daneshvar. The modern Iranian novel, especially the work of Hedayat, is one of the most distinguished of the contemporary Islamic world.
The Iranian diaspora, in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, has produced a flourishing literary tradition in Persian, English, French, German, and other languages. The works of Azar Nafisi, Marjane Satrapi, Firoozeh Dumas, Gina Nahai, Dalia Sofer, and Shahrnush Parsipur have brought the Persian literary tradition to a global audience, and the literature of the Iranian diaspora, in its many languages, is one of the most distinctive features of contemporary world literature.