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Persian language
Persian
(known variously as: فارسی Fārsi or پارسی Pārsi, local name in
Iran, Afghanistan and Tajikistan, Tajik, a Central Asian dialect, or
Dari, another local name in Tajikistan and Afghanistan) is a language spoken
in Iran, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Bahrain, Iraq, Azerbaijan,
Armenia, Southern Russia, neighboring countries, and elsewhere. Prior to British
colonization, Persian was also 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 throughout the Middle Ages and became
the official court language under the Mughal emperors. Evidence of its former
rank in the region can still be seen by the extent of its influence on Hindi and
Urdu, as well as the popularity that Persian literature still enjoys in the
region. Persian and its dialects have official-language status in the countries
of Iran, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan. According to CIA World Factbook, there are
61 million native speakers of Persian in Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan and
Uzbekistan. It belongs to the Indo-European language family, and is of the
Subject Object Verb type. Since 200 million people speak in Persian throughout
the world, UNESCO was asked to select Persian as one of its languages in 2006.
Persian literature
Persian literature
(in Persian: ادبیات پارسی) spans two and a
half millennia, though much of the pre-Islamic material has been lost. Its
sources often come from far-flung regions beyond the borders of present-day
Iran, as the Persian language flourished and survives across wide areas of
Central Asia. For instance, Rumi, one of Persia's (and Islam's) best-loved poets
wrote in Persian, but lived in Konya, now in Turkey and then the capital of the
Seljuks. The Ghaznavids conquered large territories in Central and South Asia,
and adopted Persian as their court language. There is thus Persian literature
from areas that are now part of Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and Central Asia.
Not all this literature is written in Persian, as some consider works written by
ethnic Persians in other languages, such as Greek and Arabic, to be included.
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