Iranic

The Iranic, or Iranian, languages form the western branch of Indo-Iranian within Indo-European, descended from Proto-Iranian spoken in Central Asia early in the second millennium BC and carried by tribes onto the Iranian Plateau and beyond.

Old Iranian survives in Avestan, the language of the Zoroastrian Avesta, and Old Persian, carved in royal cuneiform on Achaemenid inscriptions such as the Behistun text of Darius I around 500 BC. The Middle Iranian stage produced Middle Persian, language of the Sasanian Empire in Pahlavi script, alongside Parthian, Bactrian and Sogdian.

After the Arab conquest, New Persian emerged in the ninth century in an Arabic-derived alphabet and, under dynasties such as the Samanids, yielded the Shahnameh of Ferdowsi and became the language of administration and letters from Anatolia to India. The eastern branch includes the steppe languages of the Scythians and Alans, whose surviving descendant is Ossetian.