Translation&Interpretation Library

What Language is Spoken in Iran? ٌ What is Pahlavi? A Short History of Persian.

Puzzled at reading some messages from my connections in the LinkedIn, as to whether I can translate into Arabic, I decided to publish this post in order to dispel the popular misconceptions about the official language in Iran. I know I have named Arabic in my profile as my third language. But they think it is my mother language! A widespread misconception! I frequently receive offers from my connections asking me to translate a text into Arabic!! How to answer!? I am not an Arab!

First of all, one must make a distinction between a language and an alphabet. As for language, it could have a lot of variants, dialects and accents used in one country. A language could use a specific alphabet for writing in an era. Now let me begin by going back to the history of Persian and its alphabets. To put it short, the history of Persian could be divided into three major periods: The Old Persian, The Middle Persian and the New Persian.

The Old Persian was the language used by the early Achaemenid dynasty that ruled the Achaemenid Empire. This language lasted up until the end of the Achaemenid Empire. This language used the Persian cuneiform script for writing. After the Achaemenid Empire, we come to the next period that was the era of the Parthian Empire when the Middle Persian was spoken as their language and written in the Phlavi script.

The New Persian should be studied from the emergence of Islam onward. One of the main languages spoken in this period was Dari. It should be noted that from the Middle Persian era up until few centuries after Islam, what was used as our alphabet was the Pahlavi script as a derivative of the Aramaic alphabet.

A couple of centuries after the Islam, the new Persian adopted the Arabic alphabet to write. On the contrary, the Persian language itself resisted and didn’t give up, thanks to the Persian people, poets and writers . It has been the Persian spoken in our land since then though it has encountered changes. This discrepancy is the base of the misconceptions about the official language spoken in Iran. Some people think that Arabic is our language! In some provinces bordering Iraq, for instance in Khuzestan, people are bilingual, speaking both Arabic and Persian. However, Arabic is not our dominant language! This misconception grows up due to the use of Arabic alphabet by Persian speakers.
Persian language has a lot of dialects spoken in various parts of our country. All the parts know Persian and use it as their official language to communicate. Therefore, never forget that Persian, though it uses Arabic alphabet, is the official language spoken in Iran!
Thanks!

Nowruz (Persian: نوروز‎, pronounced [nowˈɾuːz]; lit. 'new day') is the Iranian New Year,[22][23] also known as the Persian New Year,[24][25] which begins on the spring equinox,[26] marking the first day of Farvardin, the first month of the Iranian solar calendar. It is celebrated worldwide by various ethno-linguistic groups, and falls on or around March 21 of the Gregorian calendar.

👨‍🏫 University of Isfahan's International Conference on English Language Studies

🏷 Reconciliation of the Disciplines across English Language Studies: TESOL, Translation & Interpreting (T&I), Literature

📆 11-13 December 2019

🏢 Isfahan, Iran