Farsi · فارسی

About Farsi

Language family

Indo-European, Iranian branch

Where it's spoken

Iran, with related standards in Afghanistan (Dari) and Tajikistan (Tajik)

Speakers

roughly 110 million speakers

Persian has one of the longest continuous literary traditions in the world, running from the pre-Islamic Sasanian era through the classical poetry of Ferdowsi, Rumi, and Hafez over a thousand years ago to today. Modern Farsi, Dari, and Tajik are close enough to be considered varieties of the same language despite different scripts and separate national standards. It is written in a modified Arabic script, though vocabulary and grammar are Indo-European rather than Semitic.