Farsi

Farsi, also called Persian, is an Iranian language in the Western branch of the Indo-Iranian subgroup of the Indo-European family. It is the official language of Iran and one of the world's major languages, with a wide geographic spread and a rich literary heritage. The name Farsi is the endonym used by speakers in Iran; Persian is the widely used scholarly and international designation.

There are three standard varieties: Iranian Persian (often simply Farsi) spoken in Iran, Dari spoken in Afghanistan, and Tajik spoken in Tajikistan. They are mutually intelligible to a large extent but differ in pronunciation, vocabulary, and writing systems.

In Iran and Afghanistan, Persian is written in the Perso-Arabic script, with four additional letters to represent sounds not found in Arabic: پ, چ, ژ, گ. Tajik is written in the Cyrillic script in Tajikistan and parts of Central Asia. Persian script is written right-to-left and is typically cursive.

Historically, modern Persian descends from Middle Persian and developed into the standard literary language by the 9th to 10th centuries. It reached a high literary standard in works such as Ferdowsi's Shahnameh and later poetry by Hafez, Rumi, and others. Today, Persian serves as the primary language of education, media, and public life in Iran, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan, while continuing to influence neighboring languages.

Linguistically, Persian is generally SOV (subject–object–verb), with a relatively analytic grammar. It has no grammatical gender and uses the ezafe construction to link nouns and modifiers. The vocabulary includes many Arabic loanwords and, in recent centuries, loanwords from European languages. Regional dialects reflect differences in pronunciation and lexicon among Iranian, Dari, and Tajik varieties.