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Persian linguistic data
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Common questions about Persian
What linguistic data does this Persian page show?
Word order, tone, gender count, case marking, adposition direction, syllable structure, consonant inventory traits, vowel system, morphological alignment, script, register stratification, speaker count, and geographic area. Each row is one feature with Persian's value visible; you can add other languages to read the same feature side by side.
Where do the Persian data points come from?
Typological features are merged from URIEL+ (Mortensen et al.) and a curated set authored against descriptive grammars. Speaker counts come from Ethnologue and Glottolog. Geographic area is computed from the Asher 2007 world language atlas. Similarity scores combine genetic distance, typological overlap, and lexical-borrowing data.
What is the ezāfe construction?
An unstressed short vowel -e (sometimes written, sometimes implicit) that links a noun to its modifier in possessive, attributive, and adjectival constructions. ketāb 'book' + bozorg 'big' → ketāb-e bozorg 'big book'. The same -e links possessor to possessed: ketāb-e man 'my book' (literally 'book-EZ I'). It's structurally similar to a postposition but functions as a syntactic linker.
What's the relationship between Persian, Tajik, and Dari?
All three are dialects of the same New Persian language, mutually intelligible across modern speakers. Iranian Persian (Fārsī) is the standard in Iran. Dari is the Afghan standard, written in the Perso-Arabic script. Tajik is the Tajikistan standard, written in Cyrillic since the 1930s. Vocabulary divergence is mostly in technical/educated registers.
Why does Persian have a high lexical-borrowing component with Urdu, Hindi, or Turkish?
Persian was the high-prestige administrative and literary language across much of the Islamic world for centuries, lending heavy vocabulary to Urdu, Ottoman Turkish, and (less directly) Hindi. The flow was largely one-way. The factor breakdown chip on the row tells you which dimensions contributed most.
Sources for Persian
The grammatical descriptions on this page are informed by the following published reference and descriptive grammars. Grammatical facts themselves are not subject to copyright; the scholars who documented them deserve attribution.
- Mahootian, Shahrzad. 1997. Persian (Descriptive Grammars). London: Routledge.
- Yousef, Saeed. 2018. Persian: A Comprehensive Grammar. London: Routledge.
- Lazard, Gilbert. 1992. A Grammar of Contemporary Persian. Costa Mesa: Mazda Publishers.
- Windfuhr, Gernot L. 1979. Persian Grammar: History and State of its Study. The Hague: Mouton.