Iranian Branch of the Indo-European Family

Introduction

Mountain

Avestan

The Iranian languages constitute a branch of the Indo-European language family. They are spoken over a wide area of the Middle East. Together with Indo-Aryan languages, they form the Indo-Iranian group. The languages are called Iranian because the largest members of the branch have been spoken on the Iranian plateau since ancient times. Iranian languages, together with Indo-Aryan languages have evolved from a common ancestral language called *Proto-Indo-Iranian.

Of all the Old Iranian languages only Avestan and Old Persian have left records dating from the 6th century BC. Avestan is mainly attested through the Avesta, a collection of sacred Zoroastrian texts. Old Persian is attested through numerous inscriptions in the cuneiform script.

Modern Iranian languages may have descended from Middle Iranian languages that were spoken between 300 BC and 950 AD. They are usually divided into four groups that reflect the differences in their sound systems, grammar, vocabulary, and sometimes writing.

Southwestern: Persian (Farsi), Dari, Tajiki, Luri, Bakhtiari and Judeo-Tat.
Northwestern: Kurdish and Balochi
Southeastern: Pashto, Waneci and seven Pamir languages
Northeastern: Osetin and Yaghnobi

Iran Flag
Iran

AfghanistanFlag
Afghanistan

Tajkistan Flag
Tajikistan

Kurdistan Flag
Kurdistan

According to Ethnologue, there are 87 Iranian languages, a few of of them now extinct, and many with a very small number of speakers. They are spoken today by 60-80 million people. The table below lists languages with at least half-a-million speakers. Asterisked languages are described on this website. For the rest, links are given to corresponding entries in Ethnologue.

Language	Number of speakers (in millions)	Where spoken primarily	Status
*Persian Western (Farsi)	24.5	Iran	official language of Iran
*Persian Eastern (Dari)	7.6	Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan	co-official language with Pashto in Afghanistan
*Tajik	4.5	Tajikistan, Uzbekistan	official language of Tajikistan
*Pashto	12.5	Afghanistan, Pakistan	co-official language with Dari in Afghanistan
*Kurdish	14.5	IIraq,Turkey, Iran, Syria, Armenia	official regional language of Kurdistan, Iraq
*Balochi	7	Pakistan	.
Gilaki	3.2	Iran	.
Mazanderani	3.3	Iran	.
Laki	1	Iran	.
Talysh	1.2	Azerbaijan, Iran	.
Dimli	1.5 - 2.5	Turkey	.
Bakhtiari	1	Iran	.
Luri Northern & Southern	2.4	Iran	.
Hazaragi	2.2	Afghanistan	.
Osetin	0.5 or more	Republic of Georgia	.

Structure

Sound System

Most Iranian languages have 6-7 vowels and 23-24 consonants. Some of the vowels may be short of long. Some Iranian languages, such as Pashto and Balochi, have retroflex consonants typical of languages of the Indian sub-continent, such as Urdu and Hindi. Kurdish has a vowel /ü/ typical of Turkic languages.

Grammar

All Iranian languages are inflected and share certain grammatical traits.

They add prefixes and suffixes to roots to express grammatical categories and to form words.
Some Iranian languages, such as Persian (Farsi) and Dari have lost many of their noun declensions, while others, such as Balochi, have a well-developed case system.
They do not have grammatical gender.
The tense system is based on two verbs stems: present and past.
Many Iranian languages are in the process of losing or have already lost the past tense ergative system and have replaced it with a nominative one. For example, Balochi behaves like a Nominative language in the present tense but more like an Ergative-Absolutive language in the past tense, in that the subject of a transitive verb is marked with the oblique case instead of the nominative. In addition, transitive verbs in the past tense agree only with their objects and not with their subjects. Persian (Farsi) has lost ergative constructions.
The normal word order is Subject-Object-Verb.

Vocabulary

All Iranian languages share most of their vocabulary. At the same time, their vocabularies reflect the different linguistic and cultural influences of the areas in which they are spoken. Kurdish, for instance, has incorporated a large number of Arabic words; Tajik has borrowed from Russian and Uzbek; Dari has many Pashto loanwords; and Balochi includes many Urdu words in its vocabulary. Most recently, English has become a source of borrowing in all Iranian languages, mainly in the areas of science, technology, politics, and the military.

Writing

Nearly all the Modern Iranian languages are written in the Perso-Arabic script, an adaptation of the Arabic alphabet. Some of them are are written in several different scripts.

Language	Writing system
Persian (Farsi)	Modified Perso-Arabic
Dari	Modified Perso-Arabic
Tajik	Modified Perso-Arabic, Latin, Cyrillic
Kurdish	Modified Perso-Arabic, Latin, Cyrillic
Pashto	Modified Perso-Arabic
Balochi	Arabic, modified Perso-Arabic

Resources

Click on the name of the language to learn more about it on this website

Balochi
Kurdish
Pashto
Persian (Farsi)
Persian (Dari)
Tajik