Persian

A schoolchild in Shiraz, a taxi driver in Herat and a grandmother in Khujand can recite the same lines of Hafez and understand one another. Accents and vocabulary take a little patience. In Iran the language is called Farsi; in Afghanistan, Dari; in Tajikistan, Tajik (tojikī). Linguists treat these as national standards of a single language, Persian, a member of the western branch of the Iranian languages within the Indo-European family. Its speakers usually call it, when they want to be grand about it, zabān-e Fārsi or simply Pārsi.

The name Farsi comes from Fars, the province of Shiraz and Persepolis, the old Pārsa of the Achaemenids: the Arabic alphabet has no p, so Pārsi became Fārsi. Dari is the older literary name. Medieval writers explained it as the speech of the dar, the royal court, and Afghanistan adopted it as the official name of the language in the twentieth century. There Dari is an official language alongside Pashto, while in Tajikistan Tajik has been written in the Cyrillic alphabet since 1940, after a brief period in Latin letters from 1928.

A language made in the east

New Persian, the language of today, grew out of Middle Persian, and its first great flowering came not in Fars but in the east. In the ninth and tenth centuries the Samanid court at Bukhara patronised poets who wrote in Persian in the Arabic script, and Rudaki, born near Panjakent in present-day Tajikistan, became the first master whose name everyone remembers. Ferdowsi finished the Shahnameh in Tus around 1010. From then on Persian was the language of courts and chanceries from Anatolia to Bengal: the Mughal emperors kept their records in it, and it remained an official language in British India until the 1830s.

That reach is why the three standards differ less than one might expect. Educated Dari and Tajik keep vowels that Tehran has merged, such as the long ē and ō of classical verse, so that sher ‘lion’ and shir ‘milk’ stay distinct in Kabul but sound the same in Tehran. Colloquial Tehrani shortens freely: nān ‘bread’ becomes nun, mikhāham ‘I want’ becomes mikham. Tajik has absorbed Russian words for modern things, Dari has many from Pashto and English, and Iranian Persian has borrowed generously from French. The grammar underneath, simple in its endings and rich in compound verbs built with kardan ‘to do’ and shodan ‘to become’, is common to all three.

A shared inheritance

Persian is one language of the Iranian world among many, and for millions of Kurds, Azerbaijanis, Baluch, Pashtuns, Uzbeks and others it is a second language rather than a mother tongue. It has also been, for a thousand years, the tongue in which many of them wrote poetry, kept accounts and argued about God. That is the sense in which it is shared: Rumi wrote it in Konya, Bidel in Delhi, Iqbal in Lahore, Khalili in Kabul and Loiq Sher-Ali in Dushanbe, and each of their countries reads them as its own.