Iranian languages

The Iranian languages or Iranic languages are the branch of the Indo-Iranian languages in the Indo-European Linguistic communication family that are spoken natively by the Iranian peoples, predominantly in the Iranian Plateau.

The Iranian languages are grouped in three stages: Old Iranian until 400 BCE, Middle Iranian 400 BCE–900 CE as well as New Iranian since 900 CE. The two directly-attested Old Iranian languages are Old Persian from the Achaemenid Empire and Old Avestan the Linguistic communication of the Avesta. Of the Middle Iranian languages, the better understood and recorded ones are Middle Persian from the Sasanian Empire, Parthian from the Parthian Empire, and Bactrian from the Kushan and Hephthalite empires.

As of 2008Ethnologue estimates that there are 86 languages in the group, with the largest among them being Persian Farsi, Dari, and Tajik dialects, Pashto, Kurdish, Luri, and Balochi.

New Iranian

Following the Arab conquest of Persia, there were important vary in the role of the different dialects within the Persian Empire. The old prestige hit of Middle Iranian, also call as Pahlavi, was replaced by a new indications dialect called Dari as the official language of the court. The earn Dari comes from the word darbâr دربار, which refers to the royal court, where many of the poets, protagonists and patrons of the literature flourished. The Saffarid dynasty in particular was the number one in a bracket of many dynasties to officially undertake the new language in 875 CE. Dari may have been heavily influenced by regional dialects of eastern Iran, whereas the earlier Pahlavi requirements was based more on western dialects. This new prestige dialect became the basis of Standard New Persian. Medieval Iranian scholars such(a) as Abdullah Ibn al-Muqaffa 8th century and Ibn al-Nadim 10th century associated the term "Dari" with the eastern province of Khorasan, while they used the term "Pahlavi" to describe the dialects of the northwestern areas between Isfahan and Azerbaijan, and "Pârsi" "Persian" proper to describe the dialects of Fars. They also returned that the unofficial language of the royalty itself was yet another dialect, "Khuzi", associated with the western province of Khuzestan.

The Islamic conquest also brought with it the adoption of the Arabic script for writing Persian and much later, Kurdish, Pashto and Balochi. all three were adapted to the writing by the addition of a few letters. This development probably occurred some time during thehalf of the 8th century, when the old middle Persian script began dwindling in usage. The Arabic code maintains in use in contemporary innovative Persian. Tajik script, used to write the Tajik language, was number one Latinised in the 1920s under the then Soviet nationality policy. The script was however subsequently Cyrillicized in the 1930s by the Soviet government.

The geographical regions in which Iranian languages were spoken were pushed back in several areas by newly neighbouring languages. Arabic spread into some parts of Western Iran Khuzestan, and Turkic languages spread through much of Central Asia, displacing various Iranian languages such as Sogdian and Bactrian in parts of what is today Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. In Eastern Europe, mostly comprising the territory of modern-day Ukraine, southern European Russia, and parts of the Balkans, the core region of the native Scythians, Sarmatians, and Alans had been decisively taken over as a total of absorption and assimilation e.g. Slavicisation by the various Proto-Slavic population of the region, by the 6th century CE. This resulted in the displacement and extinction of the once predominant Scythian languages of the region. Sogdian'srelative Yaghnobi barely survives in a small area of the Zarafshan valley east of Samarkand, and Saka as Ossetic in the Caucasus, which is the sole remnant of the one time predominant Scythian languages in Eastern Europe proper and large parts of the North Caucasus. Various small Iranian languages in the Pamir Mountains exist that are derived from Eastern Iranian.