PersianArabic

PersianArabic refers to the historical and contemporary interaction between the Persian (Farsi) and Arabic languages, encompassing linguistic borrowing, script usage, and cultural exchange in the Persian-speaking world. The term is often applied to the substantial Arabic lexical influence on Persian, which began with the Arab conquest of Iran in the 7th century and intensified during the Islamic Golden Age. Arabic loanwords entered Persian primarily in fields such as religion, law, science, philosophy, and administration, and many have become fully integrated, losing their original Arabic phonological features.

In addition to lexical borrowing, PersianArabic can denote the adaptation of the Arabic script for writing Persian. While Persian originally employed the Pahlavi scripts, the adoption of the Arabic abjad after the Islamization of Iran led to the development of a modified Perso‑Arabic script. This version adds four letters (پ, چ, ژ, گ) to represent sounds absent in Arabic and adjusts the orthography to accommodate Persian morphology and phonotactics.

Scholars distinguish between direct Arabic borrowings, which retain their original form and meaning, and those that have undergone semantic shift or phonological adaptation within Persian. The phenomenon also includes the creation of hybrid expressions known as “arabism‑persianisms,” where Arabic roots combine with Persian affixes.

Contemporary Persian continues to absorb Arabic terminology, especially in religious discourse, while modern media and education also promote the use of native Persian equivalents. The study of PersianArabic illuminates the broader processes of language contact, script reform, and cultural synthesis that have shaped Iran’s linguistic landscape over more than a millennium.