Persian

Persian, known to its speakers as Farsi, is a Southwestern Iranian language native to Fars in southwestern Iran. Its history has three stages: Old Persian, written in cuneiform under the Achaemenid kings and attested in the Behistun Inscription of 522 BC; Middle Persian of the Sasanian Empire; and New Persian, which arose after the Arab conquest and was written from the ninth century in a Perso-Arabic script.

The Persian revival and Seljuk conquests spread New Persian from Khorasan as a language of administration and letters. Ferdowsi's Shahnameh and the poetry of Rumi, Saadi and Hafez were read from Anatolia to India. Persian became the official language of northern India under the Mughals.

In 1337 it was the lingua franca of the Persianate world. Under the nineteenth-century Qajars the dialect of Tehran became the basis of the standard language.