Persian Language

Persian, also called Farsi, is a Western Iranian language of the Indo-European family, spoken and used officially in Iran, Afghanistan and Tajikistan in three mutually intelligible standard varieties: Iranian Persian, Afghan Persian, known as Dari, and Tajiki Persian, known as Tajik. Modern Persian continues Middle Persian, the official language of the Sasanian Empire, which itself continued the Old Persian of the Achaemenid Empire. New Persian literature was first recorded in the ninth century, after the Muslim conquest of Persia, in the Perso-Arabic script, and it includes the Shahnameh of Ferdowsi, the works of Rumi and the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. In this atlas the general Persian entry stands for records that name Persian without a stage, while Classical Persian and Middle Persian have their own entries.