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Iranian languages

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This article is about the Iranian languages. For languages spoken in Iran, see Languages of Iran. For the official language of Iran, see Persian language.
Iranian
Geographic
distribution		Southwest Asia, Central Asia, and western South Asia
Linguistic classificationIndo-European
Proto-languageProto-Iranian
Subdivisions
Language codes
ISO 639-2 / 5ira
Iranian language family tree

The Iranian languages (also called Iranic languages) form a subfamily of the Indo-Iranian languages which in turn is a subgroup of Indo-European language family. They have been and are spoken by Iranian peoples.

The Iranian languages are considered in three stages of Old (until 400 BCE), Middle (400 BCE – 900 CE), and New (since 900 CE) stages. From the Old Iranian languages the better understood and recorded ones are Old Persian (a language of Achaemenid Iran) and Avestan (the language of Zarathushtra). Middle Iranian languages included Middle Persian (a language of Sassanid Iran) and Parthian (a language of Arsacid Iran). There are many Iranian languages, the largest amongst them are Persian, Pashto, Balochi and Kurdish.

Today, there are an estimated 150–200 million native speakers of Iranian languages.[1] The Ethnologue lists 87 Iranian languages.[2] Persian has about 65 million native speakers, Pashto about 50-60 million, Kurdish about 18 million, Lurish about 2.3 million, and Balochi about 7 million.

The term

See also: Indo-Iranian languages

The term Iranian language is applied to any language which is descended from the Proto-Iranian parent language.[3] While unattested, Proto-Iranian was first spoken by presumably people/tribes in Central Asia sometime in the late 3rd to early 2nd millennium BCE. The area in which Iranian languages, i.e. descendants of Proto-Iranian, have been spoken stretches from western China to western Europe. Proto-Iranian was related to, also unattested, Proto-Indic. Proto-Indic gave birth to the various northern Indian languages over time.[3] Taken together all Iranian, Indic, and Nuristani[4] languages form the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European language family.[3]

The term Iranian was introduced in 1836 by Christian Lassen,[5] followed by Wilhelm Geiger and his Grundriss der Iranischen Philologie (1895) whereas Friedrich von Spiegel in 1859 preferred the term Eranian.[6] Robert Needham Cust, however, used the term Irano-Aryan as early as 1878.[7] Orientalists such as George Abraham Grierson and Max Müller also differentiated between Irano-Aryan and Indo-Aryan. Grierson also uses the term Eranian.[8] Some recent scholarship - primarily in German - has revived of the term Irano-Aryan in analogy to Indo-Aryan.[9][10] The linguist Ahmad Hasan Dani uses the term and asserts Iranian is short for Irano-Aryan.[11] The linguist Gilbert Lazard, specialist for Persian, has been using the term consequently in his publications,[12] whereas Mohammad Djafar[13] suggests to establish Aryan for the branch.[14] Still, Iranian remains the standard term used by the vast majority of English-language linguists.

Classification

Main article: List of Iranian languages
Indo-European language family tree.

Soon after postulating an Indo-European family in the 19th century, the Iranian languages (Avestan, Old Persian, Pahlavi) together with Indic (Sanskrit, Prakrit) were recognized by works of the linguist Rasmus Rask in 1826 as the eastern branch of Indo-European languages.[15] The Armenian language was also considered as an Iranian language but was very soon (in 1875 effectively) established as a separate language in the Indo-European group of languages.[15]

Iranian languages are divided into Eastern and Western subfamilies, totalling about 84 languages (SIL estimate). Of the most widely-spoken Iranian languages, Kurdish, Persian, and Balochi are all Western Iranian languages, while Pashto is an Eastern Iranian language.

Proto-Iranian and Old Iranian languages

Historical distribution in 100 BC: shown is Sarmatia, Scythia, Bactria and the Parthian Empire

Together with the other Indo-Iranian languages, the Iranian languages are descended from a common ancestor, Proto-Indo-Iranian. The Indo-Iranian languages are thought to have originated in Central Asia. The Andronovo culture is the suggested candidate for the common Indo-Iranian culture ca. 2000 BC.

It was situated precisely in the western part of Central Asia that borders present-day Russia (and present-day Kazakhstan). It was in relative proximity to the other satem ethno-linguistic groups of the Indo-European family, like Thracian, Balto-Slavic and others, and to common Indo-European's original homeland (more precisely, the steppes of southern Russia to the north of the Caucasus), according to the reconstructed linguistic relationships of common Indo-European.

Proto-Iranian thus dates to some time after Proto-Indo-Iranian break-up, or the early second millennium BCE, as the Old Iranian languages began to break off and evolve separately as the various Iranian tribes migrated and settled in vast areas of southeastern Europe, the Iranian plateau, and Central Asia.

Avestan, mainly attested through the Avesta, a collection of sacred texts connected to the Zoroastrian religion, is considered to belong to a central Iranian group,[16] where only peripheral groups such as southwestern (represented by Old Persian) and northeastern Sogdian and Sakan language (Scythian) had developed. Among the less known Old Iranian languages is Median, spoken in western and central Iran, which may have had an “official” status during the Median era (ca. 700–559 BC). Apart from place and personal names, some words reported in Herodotus' Histories and some preserved forms in Achaemenid inscriptions, there are numerous non-Persian words in the Old Persian texts that are commonly considered Median. Some of the modern Western and Central Iranian dialects are also likely to be descended from Median.[17]

Other such languages are Carduchi (the predecessor to Kurdish) and Parthian (which evolved into the language of the later empire).[18]

Middle Iranian languages

What is known in Iranian linguistic history as the "Middle Iranian" era is thought to begin around the 4th century BCE lasting through the 9th century. Linguistically and historically one can classify these into two main families, Western and Eastern.

The Western family includes Parthian (Arsacid Pahlavi) and Middle Persian, while Bactrian, Sogdian, Khwarezmian, Saka, and Old Ossetic (Scytho-Sarmatian) fall under the Eastern category. The two languages of the western group were linguistically very close to each other, but quite distinct from their eastern counterparts. On the other hand, the Eastern group retained some similarity to Avestan. They were inscribed in various Aramaic-derived alphabets, which had evolved from the Achaemenid Imperial Aramaic.

Middle Persian (Pahlavi) was the official language of the Sassanids. It was in use from the 3rd century CE until the beginning of the 10th century. Pahlavi and Parthian were also the languages of the Manichaeans, whose texts also survive in various non-Iranian languages, from Latin to Chinese. The Imperial Aramaic script used in this era underwent significant maturing.

New Iranian languages

See also: Persian literature
Dark green: countries where Iranian languages are official.
Teal: regional co-official/de facto status.

Following the Islamic Conquest of Persia (Iran), there were important changes in the role of the different dialects within the Persian Empire. The old prestige form of Middle Iranian, also known as Pahlavi, was replaced by a new standard dialect called Dari as the official language of the court. The name Dari comes from the word darbâr (دربار), which refers to the royal court, where many of the poets, protagonists, and patrons of the literature flourished. The Saffarid dynasty in particular was the first in a line of many dynasties to officially adopt the new language in 875 CE. Dari may have been heavily influenced by regional dialects of eastern Iran, whereas the earlier Pahlavi standard was based more on western dialects. This new prestige dialect became the basis of Standard New Persian. Medieval Iranian scholars such as Abdullah Ibn al-Muqaffa (8th century) and Ibn al-Nadim (10th century) associated the term "Dari" with the eastern province of Khorasan, while they used the term "Pahlavi" to describe the dialects of the northwestern areas between Isfahan and Azerbaijan, and "Pârsi" ("Persian" proper) to describe the Dialects of Fars. They also noted that the unofficial language of the royalty itself was yet another dialect, "Khuzi", associated with the western province of Khuzestan.

Geographic distribution of modern Iranian languages.

The Islamic conquest also brought with it the adoption of Arabic script for writing Persian, Pashto and Balochi. All three were adapted to the writing by the addition of a few letters. This development probably occurred some time during the second half of the 8th century, when the old middle Persian script began dwindling in usage. The Arabic script remains in use in contemporary modern Persian. Tajik script was first Latinised in the 1920s under the then Soviet nationality policy. The script was however subsequently Cyrillicized in the 1930s by the Soviet government.

The geographical areas in which Iranian languages were spoken was pushed back in several areas by newly neighbouring languages. Arabic spread into some parts of Western Iran (Khuzestan), and Turkic languages spread through much of Central Asia, displacing various Iranian languages such as Sogdian and Bactrian in parts of what is today Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. Sogdian barely survives in a small area of the Zarafshan valley east of Samarkand, and Saka (as Sariqoli) in parts of southern Xinjiang as well as Ossetic in the Caucasus. Various small Iranian languages in the Pamirs survive that are derived from Eastern Iranian.

Comparison table

Template:Iranian languages word table

See also

Notes

  1. ^ Windfuhr, Gernot. The Iranian languages. Routledge Taylor and Francis Group.
  2. ^ Gordon, Raymond G., Jr. (ed.) (2005). "Report for Iranian languages". Ethnologue: Languages of the World (Fifteenth ed.). Dallas: SIL International. {{cite journal}}: |first= has generic name (help); Invalid |ref=harv (help)CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  3. ^ a b c (Skjærvø 2006)
  4. ^ "the Nuristani languages, appears to constitute a separate branch of Indo-Iranian, but the exact relationship is disputed". cf. (Skjærvø 2006)
  5. ^ Lassen, Christian. 1936. Die Altpersischen Keilschrift von Persepolis. Entzifferung des Alphabets und Erklärung des Inhalts. Bonn: Weber. S. 182.
  6. ^ Spiegel, Friedrich von. 1859. Avesta. Engelmann. P. vii.
  7. ^ Cust, Robert Needham. 1878. A sketch of the modern languages of the East Indies. London: Trübner.
  8. ^ Grierson, George. A. 1920. Ishkashmi, Zebaki and Yazghulami. An Account of Three Eranian Dialects. London: Royal Asiatic Society.
  9. ^ Lazard, Gilbert. 1977. Preface in: Oranskij, Iosif M. Les langues iraniennes. Traduit par Joyce Blau.
  10. ^ Schmitt, Rüdiger. 1994. Sprachzeugnisse alt- und mitteliranischer Sprachen in Afghanistan in: Indogermanica et Caucasica. Festschrift für Karl Horst Schmidt zum 65. Geburtstag. Bielmeier, Robert und Reinhard Stempel (Hrg.). De Gruyter. S. 168–196.
  11. ^ Dani, Ahmad Hasan. 1989. History of northern areas of Pakistan. Historical studies (Pakistan) series. National Institute of Historical and Cultural Research.
    That is why we distinguish between the Aryan languages of Iran, or Irano-Aryan, and the Aryan languages of India, or Indo-Aryan. For the sake of brevity, Iranian is commonly used instead of Irano-Aryan ...
  12. ^ Lazard, Gilbert. 1998. Actancy. Empirical approaches to language typology. Mouton de Gruyter. ISBN 3110156709, 9783110156706
  13. ^ Djafar, Mohammad Un néologisme non fondé: "Irano-Aryen". Le Message de l'Islam 67 (1989) 24–27
  14. ^ Die Sprache, Band 28–29 Von Wilhelm Havers, Wiener Sprachgesellschaft.
  15. ^ a b (Mallory & Adams 2006, pp. 6–7)
  16. ^ Nicholas Sims-Williams, Iranica, under entry: Eastern Iranian languages
  17. ^ (Skjaervo 2006) vi(2). Documentation.
  18. ^ Roland G. Kent: "Old Persion: Grammar Texts Lexicon". Part I, Chapter I: The Linguistic Setting of Old Persian. American Oriental Society, 1953.

References

Template:Iranian-speaking regions Template:Distribution of Iranian languages

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