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About 2.5 million Afghans in Iran and Afghans in Pakistan, part of the wider Afghan diaspora, also speak Dari Persian as one of their primary languages. [56] Dari Persian dominates the northern, western, and central areas of Afghanistan, and is the common language spoken in cities such as Balkh, Mazar-i-Sharif, Herat, Fayzabad, Panjshir ...
Persian is a member of the Western Iranian group of the Iranian languages, which make up a branch of the Indo-European languages in their Indo-Iranian subdivision.The Western Iranian languages themselves are divided into two subgroups: Southwestern Iranian languages, of which Persian is the most widely spoken, and Northwestern Iranian languages, of which Kurdish and Balochi are the most widely ...
Many local languages are dialects and/or endangered. [Note 1] [5] Dari, as a shared language between multiple ethnic groups in the country, has, historically, served as a lingua franca between different groups in the region, and is the most widely understood language in the country.
Dari and Tajik, on the other hand, preserve the earlier forms. For instance, the word Nowruz (نوروز in Perso-Arabic, Наврӯз in Tajik) is realized as /nowruːz/ in Iran's Standard Persian and /nawroːz/ in Standard Dari, and نخیر meaning "no" is /naχejr/ in Iran's Standard Persian and /naχajr/ in Standard Dari.
"New Persian" is the name given to the final stage of development of Persian language. The term Persian is an English derivation of Latin Persiānus, the adjectival form of Persia, itself deriving from Greek Persís (Περσίς), [12] a Hellenized form of Old Persian Pārsa (𐎱𐎠𐎼𐎿), [13] which means "Persia" (a region in southwestern Iran corresponding to modern-day Fars province).
In Dari and Tajik /a/ is the most common vowel and at the end of a word may be pronounced as /æ/. [a] Unlike Iranian Persian, Dari has 5 long vowels /ɑː/, /eː/, /iː/, /oː/, and /uː/. The Dari vowel /ɑː/ and the Iranian vowel /ɒː/ are, respectively, the unrounded and rounded versions of the same vowel. ('roundedness' refers to the ...
Farsi is spoken by more than 100 million people in Iran and nearby countries, while Mandarin, with more than 1 billion speakers, is the majority language in China.
The language of Zoroastrian literature (and of the Sasanian inscriptions) is sometimes referred to as Pahlavi – a name that originally referred to the Pahlavi scripts, [13] [14] which were also the preferred writing system for several other Middle Iranian languages. Pahlavi Middle Persian is the language of quite a large body of literature ...