Persian phrasebook

Persian (فارسی, Farsi) is a language in the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European family. It is a direct descendant of Middle Persian, which is derived from Old Persian. You can find many grammatical similarities between Persian and the other languages of this family. However, Persian is more similar to its contemporary languages like Sanskrit, Greek or Latin than to relatively newer languages. For instance, both Latin and Persian have a subject-object-verb (SOV) basic word order - though both also use other orders sometimes - which is uncommon among modern European languages. Today, Persian is mainly spoken in Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Bahrain. It has official status in the first three countries but was once the official, court, or literary language of many more places ranging from Turkey through India. At this time, many Persian poets emerged from the Indian subcontinent, Central Asia and the regions under the control of the Ottoman Empire. It is still appreciated as a literary and prestigious language among the educated elite. Many people in Iran and neighboring countries know Persian fluently even if it's not their mother tongue. The Persian Empire was historically much bigger than today's Iran before losing many territories, especially to its neighbor Russia. After the 1979 revolution, many Iranians migrated to the West and as a result, there are numerous Persian-speaking communities throughout the world, particularly in the USA. Persian is the second language of Islam so in many Islamic countries you can find someone knowing Persian.

The native name of the language is Farsi (فارسی). The word Farsi has also entered English mainly because Iranian immigrants in the West didn't know about the native English name of their language (i.e. Persian) and began to use Farsi, which still prevails although somewhat decreased. Persian has three standard dialects: Iranian Persian (Farsi), Afghan Persian (Dari) and Tajik Persian (Tajik). They are all mutually intelligible. The written form is the same for Farsi and Dari, both using the Arabic alphabet; Tajik is generally written with the Cyrillic alphabet.

Note - The contents of this page are written in literary Persian (though pronunciations are based on the Iranian Standard) so phrases written here will be understood not only in Iran but also in Afghanistan, Tajikistan and other countries. However, standard pronunciations may differ in those countries, generally due to those varieties differentiating certain vowels which do not exist in Iranian Persian. Since vowels are not commonly written in Iranian Persian or Dari, this has little effect on writing. See Dari phrasebook for Afghan Persian and Tajik phrasebook for information on those varieties.