Persian

Persian (local name: Fĝrsī or Pĝrsī) is an Indo-European language spoken in Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan and by minorities in Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia, Southern Russia, neighboring countries, and elsewhere. It is derived from the language of the ancient Persian people. It is part of the Iranian branch of the Indo-Iranian language family.

This is one of many languages used by Guru Gobind Singh in the Sikh Scriptures call Dasam Granth. The famous Zafarnama, the "letter of victory" written by the Guru in 1705-1706 was written to Emperor Aurangzeb in this language. It was also the language of choice for Bhai Nand Lal ji and many other Sikh writers in the times of the tenth Gurus.

Persian has been a medium for extensive literary and scientific contributions to the Western world as well as the Islamic nations. It has had an enormous influence on certain neighbouring languages, particularly the Turkic languages of Central Asia, Caucasus, and Anatolia and the Indo-Aryan languages of Punjab. It has had a lesser influence on Arabic and other languages of Mesopotamia.

For five centuries prior to the British colonization of south Asia, Persian was widely used as a second language in the Indian subcontinent; it took prominence as the language of culture and education in several Muslim courts in the subcontinent and became the "official language" under the Mughal emperors. Only in 1843 did the British force the subcontinent to begin conducting business in English instead of the traditional Persian.[1] Evidence of its former rank in the region can still be seen by the extent of its influence on Urdu, Hindi, Bengali, and Sindhi language, as well as the popularity that Persian literature still enjoys in the region.

Persian and its dialects have official-language status in Iran, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan. According to CIA World Factbook, based on old data, there are 71 million native speakers of Persian in Iran [1], Afghanistan [2], Tajikistan [3] and Uzbekistan [4] and there are about the same number of other people who can speak Persian throughout the world. It belongs to the Indo-European language family, and is of the Subject Object Verb type. UNESCO was asked to select Persian as one of its languages in 2006.[5]