By Persian I mean anyone who speaks one of the Persian languages: Farsi, Pashto, Kurdish, Dari, Tajik and so on.
The Persians live south of the Turks and Russians, west of India and north and east of the Arab world. Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, western Pakistan and the Kurds are Persian.
In this sense, what we know of as Iran is, in fact, only western Persia! And not all Iranians are themselves Persians: one in four are Azeris, the Turks who live in the north-west and once ruled Iran.
The Persians are famous for their great poets. Because they were more advanced than the Arabs in the early days of Islam, the Persians have profoundly affected the Muslim world. The Turks and the Muslims in Pakistan and India in particular followed the Persians as their model.
Here is the family tree. It has all the living languages with at least a million speakers. Those without numbers are dead but notable.
- North-eastern
- Scythian
- Sarmatian
- Alanian
- Khwarezmian
- Bactrian
- Avestan – language of Zoroastrian holy books
- Sogdian – from the 700s to the 900s this was the main language of Samarkand and the Silk Road
- Ossetian (0.7) – Caucasus
- South-eastern
- Pashto (50) – eastern Afghanistan, western Pakistan
- South-western
- Farsi (110) – main language in Iran
- Dari (18 ) – main language in Afghanistan
- Tajik (5) – main language in Tajikistan
- Hazaragi (2) – middle of Afghanistan
- Tat (4) – west of Caspian
- Luri (2) – western Iran
- North-western
- Parthian – ruled Persia in late Roman times
- Median
- Kurdish (40) – Turkey, Iraq, Iran
- Zazaki (2) – in Turkey
- South of the Caspian:
- Mazandarani (12)
- Gileki (4)
- Talysh (2)
- Baluchi (8 ) – southern Pakistan
No doubt some speakers are counted twice here, but clearly there are at least 200 million Persians. As a people that makes them comparable to the Turks (150), Russians (150) and Arabs (200).
Half the Pashtuns (those who speak Pashto, also called Pushtuns or Pathans) live in Afghanistan, half in Pakistan. This is no accident: the British split their country in half to make them less of a threat back when the British ruled India.
Before the coming of Islam, the Persians gave the world two religions: Zoroastrianism and Manichaeism. Most Persians used to be Zoroastrians, though some were Buddhists or even Christians. Now most are Muslims.
There are still about 100,000 Zoroastrian Persians: they live mainly in India and are called Parsis. Although their holy scriptures are in ancient Persian (Avestan), these days they speak Gujarati and English. That is why they are not on the list above.
Shia Islam did not become widespread among Persians till 500 years ago under the Safavid kings. Most Persians in the west are now Shiites, most in the east are Sunni.
Only the Ossetians are Christians. There are some Jews as well.
The Persians came down from Central Asia about 2000 BC. The north-eastern branch – the Scythians, Sarmatians and others – remained in Central Asia till the coming of the Turks. All that is left of them are the Ossetians.
There are three natural Persian countries:
- Kurdistan – south-eastern Turkey, northern Iraq
- Iran – without the Azeri north-west or the Arab south-west
- Khorasan – Afghanistan, Tajikistan, western Pakistan
Kurdistan and Khorasan are Sunni, Iran is Shia.
The Ossetians are too few to count as a separate country.
See also:
Fair write up. Worth mentioning, too, are:
-Greater Persia reached from within modern day China to Yemen.
-Mithraism, the faith of the vast majority of Rome’s army, originated in Persia.
-Baha’i Faith is also of Persian origin.
-Prior to zionism, Iranians and Jews were very much positively involved in each other’s civilizations and cultures.
-British (and American) meddling led not only to the sundering of Pashtun lands but also the DESTRUCTION of democracy within Iran in favor of the disgraced Pahlavi monarchy, which led to the current Islamic fundamentalism.
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delurking myself… This is an amazine breakdown!
Worth mentioning also is the massive Persian Jewish exodus of 1980 after the Shah was overthrown. Many, many Persian Jews were forced to leave Iran and ended up in Beverly Hills, Ca creating the largest concentration of Persians outside of their homeland. They showed up because the climate was similar and paid cash for multimillion dollar homes. One generation later they pretty much make up the majority of the residential population: the mayor is Persian (Jimmy Delshad), they pushed to have all election materials translated into farci and they’ve left local historical societies scrambling to create legislation that restricts their right to knock down hundreds of historical homes and build what has been dubbed “persian palaces”.
I don’t live in Beverly Hills but I work there and the transformation is fascinating. A group of people with the means (money) to completley flout assimilation is a phenomenon to me. Though many of them speak english fluently it pretty much stops there. Coming from a culture that apparently shamelessly assigned immunity to the wealthy, every interaction is a negotiation. They pay with $100 bills because they don’t use banks. To them everyone has a price it only needs to be named. It is never presented with the intention to offend – it’s normal. They’ve also apparently taken root in nearby (very affluent) Hancock Park.
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Kurds and Pashtoons have languages which are related to Persian(Farsi), but this relationship is not very much much close and they are completely separate languages from Persian(Farsi). Pashto and Kurdish are not mutually intelligible with Persian, even in written form, and Kurds and Pashtoons are usually not referred to as Persians, although many Kurds of Iran and Pashtoons of Afghanistan speak Persian(Farsi) as their second language. On the contrary, Dari and Tajik are not separate languages, but merely alternative names of the Persian(Farsi) language, introduced in Afghanistan and Tajikistan respectively because of political reasons. In Tajikistan which was Soviet until 1991, Soviets have imposed the cyrillic alphabet in 1940, so that nowadays Persian(Farsi) in Tajikistan is written in cyrillic characters and referred officially as Tajiki or Farsi-ye Tajiki while the Persian(Farsi) of Afghanistan is written in Arab characters(as in Iran) and is officially referred as Dari(but unofficially often as Farsi or Farsi-Kabuli). Colloquial forms of Persian(Farsi) in Tehran, Kabul and Dushambe do differ, but they are largely mutually intelligible(a situation similar to that of Chicago, London and Sydney; Paris and Quebec; Mexico City, Buenos Aires and Madrid; Rio de Janeiro, Luanda and Lisbon). Some differences exist on the level of the official standards as well but much less than in colloquial speach.
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The vast majority of Pasthuns live in Pakistan.
Pakistan has the largest Pasthun population in the world, and many of Pakistan’s Presidents,Prime Ministers,politicians,Actors,Singers,Models, and athletes are of Persian/Pasthun origin.
Pasthuns have the highest birth rates in Pakistan and many non-Pasthun Pakistanis are fearing that Pasthuns could change the country’s demographic.
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Gatobranco said:
Comments so far suggest a monolithic Kurdish language, and that’s misleading.
Kurdish, the language of the Kurds, is not one language.
As far as I know, the two main ones Kurmanji (spoken by most Kurds in Turkey, Armenia, Iran, Syria) and Sorani (spoken in Iraq) are not even mutually intelligible. Another of the Kurdish languages, Zaza, is even less related to those two.
So far, when I’ve searched for books in “Kurdish”, it’s usually the minority Sorani dialect that I’ve found. When written, it’s in a script that looks like Arabic, although it is not a kind of “Arabic”, more a Persian-type (of course).
Books or dictionaries in Kurmanji have been much harder to find, although this form of Kurdish is written in Roman letters. Kurmanji uses a lot of Xs, and Qs and Ws, and some words have a “throaty” and back-of-mouth pronunciation, like a combinations heard in German and French.
Perhaps it’s hard to find books in Kurmanji because most Kurmanji speakers are Turkish, and the Kurdish/Kurmanji language was banned in Turkey.
I think even now, the alphabet of Kurmanji is not allowed to exist in Turkey, and the Q, W and X letters are not permitted, not being part of the Turkish language, and forbidden.
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Yes, you are abolutely correct, Kurmanji and Sorani are indeed different languages, they are similar to a degree that Spanish and Italian or German and Dutch are, but certainly not mutually intelligible. And certainly, both Kurmanji and Sorani are even more dissimilar with Persian, probably no more similar than English and Swedish.
I think that book-printing in Kurmanji is not any more outrightly banned in Turkey, but anyway, the language is far from being promoted
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I would like mention still another form of Iranic speech – the Northern-Tajiki, spoken in the North of Tajikistan(mainly Khujand, Isfara, Istarafshan and Panjikant) and Uzbekistan(Samarkand, Bukhara). It is a creole language, possessing mostly Persian vocubulary, together with heavily Turkified syntactic structure, very similarly like the Haitian creole possesses mostly French vocabulary with the syntaxis derived from West African languages(mostly Fongbe). It has emerged first as a contact language, a pidginized form of Persian, used by Turkic migrants to Central Asia after the times of Chinghiz-Khan. Since Turks had big political clout in the Central Asia(most of the military, although not civil, aristocracy were Turks), their jargon had a certain prestige it was finaly adopted as a native language by first by Persianized Turks, then by local Persians themselves.
The Northern-Tajiki is sharply different from the standard Tajiki Persian, which is a localized form of modern litterary Persian.
As for the Southern part of Tajikistan, including the capital Dushanbe, the dialect is more or less the same like in Afghanistan, the difference lies mostly in the extensive use of Russian loanwords in the former. It is also different from the Standard Tajiki Persian or from Standard Afghan Persian, but to much lesser degree, that the Northern creole.
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Around 1940 there was a trend among some revolutionary Tajiki Persian intellectuals in the then Soviet Central Asia to fully replace the Standard Persian with a new literary language completely derived from the Northern Tajiki creole(most Samarkand and Bukhara varieties), a similar thing that was done or attempted in Seychelles, Haiti and elsewhere. Yet the majority of Central Asian Persian(Tajiki) intelligentsia was strongly against this move, considering it as a complete breech with their historic past, so it finished by adopting only certain, less salient features of Samarkand-Bukharan dialect, the Standard Tajiki Persian language remaining essentially Persian in its structure. Currently there is a linguistical strugle in Tajikistan among those who would like to maintain the standard established in Soviet times more or less intact, and those who would like to move closer to the Iranian Persian standard.
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@ Gatobranco
True, but there’s a bit more to it. I don’t think Ankara allows the Kurdish language yet to be taught in schools — particularly in the SE of the country.
You’re right, the language is not banned and forbidden outright — it IS permitted now.
But, the Turkish language is key to unifying Turkey. Absolutely.
In this sense, a language like Kurdish has been a fly in the ointment of unity, therefore the violence of enforcing that language directive reaches and repercusses beyond “non-promotion”.
I would liken the Kurdish language situation, perhaps, to the behaviour of some creatures that have been encaged all their lives who suddenly have the cage doors opened: the creature does not quickly and confidently pounce out.
For a suppressed language and people in a country like Turkey, the notion of “rights”and language rights will be slow on the uptake.
It’s a form of democracy that is more rigid than the word would suggest.
Since the founding of the Republic, Kurds in Turkey were not called “Kurds”, they were called instead, “mountain Turks”. And there is still the phrase to describe these people from the east: Dogu.
I remember the sophisticated, urban Turks using it as a euphemism to describe the less well-off, less educated country folks from the East of the country…
And, there have been times when “Kurd” has been the byword for “uncivilized” and “unclean”.
Let’s also consider the impact of the Sun-Language Theory, the claim being that Central Asia is the cradle of human civilisation, the Turks’ true homeland and their language being the mother of all human languages. Accordingly, in that pseudo-linguistic world-view, the Kurds were a tribe that had come under the misguidance of Persians, and the resulting language of Kurdish was thus not only inauthentic, but inferior.
These days, I am not sure if there is much space given over in Turkish public life for Kurdish. I haven’t explored it in detail. Yes, there is a TV channel, but Turkey’s Kurdish population are a large minority and this was started to service them. As a 2nd language, I don’t think Kurdish is perceived to be as useful or prestigious as say, French.
It seems like a small thing, but the use of the X, W and Q in the alphabet has not been allowed in Turkey’s official documents: what this has meant is that the Kurd’s (and also Persian) traditional Springtime festival Newroz must be spelled as “NeVroz”, and when it is not, the organizers and journalists who use the wrong spelling have been singled out for the State’s attentions because this exposes a rejection of Turkey’s hegemony.
To me, that’s quite revealing.
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@ Gatobranco, fascinating stuff about Tajikistan.
You say: “Around 1940 there was a trend among some revolutionary Tajiki Persian intellectuals in the then Soviet Central Asia to fully replace the Standard Persian with a new literary language completely derived from the Northern Tajiki creole…”
Could you tell me why this became a trend?
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There was general policy of the Soviets/bolsheviks/marxists to rapproach the written language to the spoken, to abolish those forms of language which they considered “elitary”, of the “feudal” or “capitalist” classes. In the twenties of 20 century there were some bolshevik politicians in the Central Asia who even wanted to abrogate the Persian language(considered the language of ruling political and religious elite) altogether and replace it with Turkish, the “language of working masses”(as most of the countryside spoke some form of Turkish, Persian was spoken chiefly in cities and in some mountain regions, now mostly within Tajikistan).
Concerning the Central Asian Turkish itself, the classical Chaghatay literary language was replaced by the spoken variety used in Ferghana valley and Tashkent Oasis, thus forming the base of the modern Uzbek. Another measure was change of alphabet. First Roman, and then Cyrillic alphabet was imposed instead of Arabic. This served also as a tool to diminish the impact of Muslim religion on masses.
Yet Persian speaking communists succeded to convince Stalin that giving too much to Turks would be dangerous for Soviet interest and that a separate Persian speaking Soviet Republic should be established. In 1929 the Tajik SSR was founded, with a newly founded capital Dushanbe. However, the largest Persian speaking cities Samarkand and Bukhara became part of the Turkish Uzbekistan, and all efforts of Tajik communists to get the revision of borders from Moscow were in vain.
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In 1924, Communists established in the Central Asia so-called “soviet republics” according to ethnolinguistic criteria instead of former politico-administrative entities – Bukharan Emirate, Khivan Khanate and Turkestan General-Gouvernement. The Communist took European states as their model , where usually every country has one dominating. However it was not the case in the Central Asia whose ethnolinguistic map was checkered like leopard’s skin. Trying to draw borderlines according to linguistic criteria was thus not an easy task and resulted in very capricious, crooked and winding border lines, which left numeous minorities on each side and nobody was satisfied with the partition. During Soviet times these were however not real borders, more like borders between the US or Australian states. More serious border and ethnical problems started when in 1991 Central Asian nations became independant.
In 1924 – Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan SSR were created, followed in 1929 by Tajikistan, and in 1936, by Kazakhstan and Kyrghyzstan.
Soviet Republics had no real authonomy, they weere strictly ruled from Moscow, although they had some trappings of souvereign states(flag, hymn), were recognized as nations by the Soviet constitution, and had a sense of national identity.
Uzbekistan is the least homogenous state, being an amalgam of three Turkish groups(Chaghatay, Qipchaq and Khorezmian-Oghuz) and Tajiki-Persians in Samarkand, Bukhara and elsewhere, which in past belonged to three different khanate – Khiwa, Bukhara and Quqand – and have different regional traditions. Tajikistan is also far from homogenous – there are large difference, in dialect, social customs, religion there were big differences between various regional groups(Khujandis, Kulyabis, Gharmis and Pamiris). Takistan also has considerable Uzbek-Turkish population. It is not suprising that in 1992, a civil war broke out which lasted until 1997, with more than 100 000 killed and more than 1 000 000 displaced. In Uzbekistan, the rule of brutal dictatorial regim of Islam Karimov, however, as yet prevented the country from going into civil war or disintegrating.
Pamiri etnic group which lives in Mountain Badakhshan authonomous region(Wilawyat-e Khodmokhtar-e Badakhshawn-e Koohee), is different from the rest of Tajikistan, since they are Ismaili(Sevener Shia) muslims and not Sunnis, as the rest of Tajikistan, and secondly they speak so called Pamiri Languages(Shughni-Rushani, Wakhi, Ishkashimi, Yazghulami) belonging to East Iranian languagees, and learn Tajiki Persian in school.
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In the end of 19 – beginning of 20 century many Central Asian intellectuals, both Tajiki Persian and Turkic, went for studies to Ottoman Turkey. It was the center of the Sunni Caliphate and almost only independent Muslim state at that time, so it has attraction for Muslims from the Russian Empire. Tajik Persians preferred to go for studies to Turkey rather than to Persian speaking Iran, because they were Sunnis, Turks also Sunnis, but Iranians were Shias. While in Turkey many of them were convinced by Turkish nationalists that they were originally Turks, that they distanrt ancestors Soghdians were Turks later forcibly persianized and that they should return to their “original nationality”, Turkish( what is complete nonsense since Soghdians were one of Eastern Iranian peoples). Yet some of Tajiki intelligents became proponents of Panturkism and campaigned strongly that Samarkand and Bukhara would become the part of the Uzbek SSR. That is one of reasons why these cities became part of Uzbekistan, rather than Tajikistan.
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