Iranian Group
The third and last group of the Indo-Iranian
subfamily consists of the Iranian languages, spoken by about 95 million
people, mainly in Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and parts of Central
Asia. Historically, the oldest Iranian forms of which there are any
records are Avestan and Old Persian, both highly inflected languages.
Old Persian has survived in cuneiform inscriptions from the time of the
Achaemenid kings, who ruled ancient Persia during the 6th to 4th cent.
B.C. Avestan is the language in which was composed the Avesta, or sacred
text of the Zoroastrian religion. The Avesta probably dates from about
the 7th to the 5th cent. B.C., but apparently was handed down orally and
was not recorded in writing until much later. Avestan is still in use
today as the liturgical language of the Zoroastrian faith. The Middle
Iranian period, dating from the 3d cent. B.C. to the 9th or 10th cent.
A.D., is characterized by considerable grammatical simplification, as in
the reduced inflection of the noun and verb. Among the languages
surviving in written records that fall within this period are Parthian,
Middle Persian, Khwarazmian, Sogdian, and Saka.
The modern
Iranian languages, dating from about the 9th or 10th cent. to the
present, show phonetic and grammatical simplification. For example, case
endings tend to be dropped and the use of prepositions substituted. The
most important of the modern Iranian languages is Modern Persian
(FārsĪ) the official tongue of Iran, which stems directly from Middle
Persian, but has been influenced by Arabic and Turkish. It has a great
literature of considerable age and is spoken by over 40 million persons
in Iran and Afghanistan. There are a number of dialects of Modern
Persian. Other modern Iranian languages include Pashto (also called
Pushtu and Afghan), with 18 million speakers in Afghanistan, where it is
the national language, and in Pakistan and Iran; Baluchi, which has
about 6 million speakers, chiefly in Pakistan and Iran; Kurdish, the
language of perhaps 20 million Kurds living mainly in Turkey, Iran,
Iraq, and Syria; the Pamir dialects or languages, spoken in parts of
Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the former Soviet Union; Yaghnobi, which is
derived from Sogdian and spoken in Tajikistan; and Tajiki, a tongue of
more than 5 million people in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Today's Iranian
languages are written in adaptations of the Arabic alphabet, except for
Tajiki, which uses Cyrillic characters.
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