Departments & Related Programs

Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies Department

Emory Favorites

Sites and Scenes from in and around Tabriz
All About Afghanistan
Check out Tajikistan
Links to Iranian TV, Radio, Newspapers, Magazines, Organizations
Persian Dictionaries on-line
Map of Iran
Map of Afghanistan
Map of Tajikistan
Hear/Read Persian Poetry - Music
Hear/Read Persian Poetry - Literature

Persian

Introduction

"Welcome to Persian at Emory", a video message by professor Frank Lewis

Persian belongs to the Iranian group of the Indo-Iranian subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages. The official language of Iran, it has about 38 million speakers in Iran and another 8 million in Afghanistan. The modern form of Persian evolved directly from Middle Persian and may be said to have begun in the 9th or 10th century A.D. It has not changed much since that date. A number of Arabic words were added to the vocabulary as the result of the conquest of the Persians by the Muslim Arabs in the 7th century A.D. Modern Persian is the medium of an old and great literature and is written in a modification of the Arabic alphabet. Modern Persian is also known as Farsi.