15 facts on the beautiful Farsi/Dari/Persian language, an official language of Afghanistan

 15 facts on the beautiful Farsi/Dari/Persian language, an official language of Afghanistan.

Fact 1: The Persian language has generally been regarded as one of the most prestigious throughout history (some people objected, but every language has its critics). It is associated with powerful empires, culture, poetry and scholarship.

Fact 2: There survive very little examples of written "Old" Persian of the Achaemenids (550-330 BC). The lingua franca, administrative & official language of the Achaemenid empire was Aramaic, a Semetic language. The Achaemenid aristocracy / elites also spoke Elamite & Aramaic.

Fact 3: The court language of the Sassanids (224-651 CE) was "Middle" Persian, but it did not replace the old lingua franca of the region. Most people in the Sassanid empire, including the vast majority of Iranic people, preserved their languages and were not Persian speakers.

Fact 4: When Arabs defeated the Sassanids in the 7th century, it resulted in "two centuries of silence" of Persian literature. Arabic became the language of the court, scholarship, and prestige from Spain to Central Asia. Persian almost completely ceased to be written.

Fact 5: The earliest surviving written record of "New" Persian is an inscription in Central Afghanistan, dated 752 CE. It is written in the Hebrew script. Syriac and Manichean scripts were also used before the Arabic script became dominant.

Fact 6: "New" Persian was not first developed in Fars, the homeland of the Persians, but in Khorasan (Eastern Iran, Afghanistan + other Central Asian "stans") around the 8th - 9th centuries, from where it spread to Iran and South Asia.

... When "New" Persian was already firmly established and prospering in Khorasan / Afghanistan, "Middle" Persian was still in use in Iran's western provinces, although to a much lesser extent than before.

Fact 7: Persian + non-Persian empires adopted, promoted and defended the "New" Persian language e.g. the Tajik empires, Mongol empires, Uzbek empires, Pashtun empires, Turkic empires, Indian empires + others. Result: Persian was spoken from Istanbul (Turkey) to Dhaka (Bangladesh)

Fact 8: The court langauge of the early Mughals was Turkic. The Pashtun Emperor Sher Shah Suri defeated the Mughals in 1540 & reintroduced Persian as the court language of India under his empire. Persian remained the official court language of India until the 1830s.

Fact 9: "New" Persian was not developed by one ethnicity, empire or group of people. Iranologist and linguist professor Bo Utas confirms a "multiethnic" origin of "New" Persian and states it "must be regarded as something of a multicultural construction."

Fact 10: Historically, many non-Persians from Turkey to India who aspired to write in the literary langauge of their time, wrote in Persian, Arabic, and later Turkish. Many historical poets and scholars who wrote in Persian did not specify their ethnicity or leave detailed...

... biographies, so history has generally regarded them as Persians because there is no definitive information to prove otherwise. Ethnicities a thousand years ago were far more fluid and relaxed than the rigid conception of ethnicites some modern people have.

Fact 11: Afghanistan's greatest 20th century Persian poet was Khalilullah Khalili (1907-1987). He wrote a book on King Kalakani and is linked to Tajik nationalism... but he was a Safi Pashtun from Parwan. What if history had not recorded his Pashtun ethnicity? Reflect on that.

Fact 12: Persian is a shared language of many countries/peoples. It was spoken, written & promoted by Kurds, Turks, Persians, Tajiks, Mongols, Pashtuns, Uzbeks, Kashmiris, Punjabis, Sikhs, Balochis, Indians + many others. Many of the great Persian poets were not ethnic Persians.

Most of the classical Pashtun poets and kings of Afghanistan also wrote Persian poetry aside from Pashto. The Durrani kings supported the Persian language, enjoyed Persian poetry and made Persian their official langauge.

Fact 13: The beautiful heritage of the "New" Persian language is not the property of one country or one ethnicity. Neither Iran nor any other country own the Persian language - it belongs in Afghanistan and other Central Asian "stans" as much as it belongs in Iran.

Fact 14: Most Afghans (Uzbeks, Pashtuns, Tajiks, Hazaras + others) speak Persian as a first / second language. It has been the lingua franca of the region for a thousand years. All major Afghan ethnics have contributed and used the Persian language over the past thousand years."

Fact 15: The heritage of Persian, Pashto, Uzbek, Balochi, Turkmen, Nuristani + other national languages of Afghanistan, belong to all Afghans regardless of their ethnic background. This rich diversity is the beauty of the nation and must be preserved.

"And of His signs is the creation of the heavens and the earth and the diversity of your languages and your colours. Indeed, in that are signs for those of knowledge.” (Quran Surah ar-Rum, 30:22)