Farsi, also known as Persian Language, is the most widely spoken member of the Iranian branch of the Indo-Iranian languages, a subfamily of the Indo-European languages. Farsi is spoken today primarily in Iran and Afghanistan, but was historically a more widely understood language in an area ranging from the Middle East to India.
Farsi in Iran is written in a variety of the Arabic script called Perso-Arabic, which has some innovations to account for Persian phonological differences. This script came into use in Persia after the Islamic conquest in the seventh century. Farsi is a subgroup of West Iranian languages that include Dari and Tajik; the less closely related languages of Luri, Bakhtiari, and Kumzari; and the non-Persian dialects of Fars Province.
Indo-Iranian languages are spoken in a wide area stretching from portions of eastern Turkey and eastern Iraq to western India. Old Persian is attested from the cuneiform inscriptions left by the Achaemenid dynasty to BC. The origin of Farsi or Modern Persian is not clear. Although greatly influenced and closely affiliated to Middle and Old Persian, there is no conclusive evidence that it is directly descended from these languages.
Afghanistan has two official languages - Pashto and Dari. Pashto is an entirely different language from Farsi, but Dari and Farsi are two accents of the same language.
The terms Farsi and Dari are sometimes used interchangeably, or the language is called Persian in the English language. Farsi or Persian is the only official language of Iran. This is despite the fact that Iran has a large population made up of many ethnicities. Persian is widely understood by the Iranian people, and the language belongs to the Indo-Iranian language family.
In Iran, Persian is also the language used for formal communications and literary purposes. In this respect Iranians have made the art of calligraphy and refined penmanship their own.
The Persian spoken in Afghanistan is known as Dari. The Persian language of Tajikistan is called Tajiki. During the Soviet era Tajiki had minimal contact with other Persian speaking countries; it contains a large number of Russian words and is written in the Cyrillic Russian script. Persian is the second language of Islam and was instrumental in the spread of the faith during the reign of the Moguls in the Indian subcontinent, where it was cultivated and held in high esteem until the end of the Mogul rule in Persian poetry is still a significant part of the literature of the subcontinent.
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