Language

Nearly 60% of Iranians speak Persian and Persian dialects (the country's official language). 26% speak Turkic and Turkic dialects, 9% speak Kurdish, whilst the remainder speak Luri, Balochi. Arabic, Turkish or other languages.

Persian

Persian is an Iranian tongue belonging to the Aryan or Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European family of languages. The known history of the Persian language can be divided into three distinct periods: Old Persian, Parthian and Middle Persian, and New Persian.

Old Persian supposedly evolved from Proto-Indo-Iranian on the western wing in the Iranian plateau. The first known written evidence of Persian appears with the rise of the Persian Empire under Cyrus the Great of the Achaemenid dynasty in 550 BC.

During the Parthian and Sassanid empires, the morphology of the language was simplified from the complex conjugation and declension system of Old Persian to the almost completely regularized morphology and rigid syntax of Middle Persian.

The Islamic conquest of Persia marks the beginning of the modern history of Persian language and literature. It is known as the golden era of Persian. The Islamic conquest of Iran commenced a synthesis of the Arabic and Iranian tongues. By the tenth century, the effects of this diffusion threatened to erase native Persian entirely, as Persian writers, scientists, and scholars elected to write in Arabic, the lingua franca of the day. This prompted Ferdowsi to compose the Shahnameh (Persian: Book of Kings), Iran's national epic, entirely in native Persian. This gave rise to a strong reassertion of Iranian national identity, and is in part responsible for the continued existence of Persian as a separate language.