Persian is spoken by large populations in Iran, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan. Each of these populations calls its language "Farsi." English speakers generally refer to "Farsi" as the dialect spoken in Iran, "Dari" as the dialect spoken in Afghanistan, and "Tajiki" as the dialect spoken in Tajikistan. All three dialects are mutually intelligible. Tajiki reveals a stronger influence from Turkic languages and includes a large number of borrowed Russian words. In formal usage, Dari is closer to the Farsi of Tehran, whereas colloquial or informal Dari is closer to Tajiki. Approximately 60 million Iranians speak Farsi, 20 million Afghans speak Dari, and 5 million Tajikistans speak Tajiki. Additional speakers reside outside of their home regions.
The two official languages of Afghanistan are Dari, spoken largely in the north and the center, and Pashto, spoken largely in the south. As the language of business and higher education, Dari carries the greater prestige. Most Pushtuns are competent in Dari, although fewer Dari speakers learn Pashto.
Persian, an Indo-European language, is one of the most ancient languages of the world, dating back to the sixth century BC. Persian is the language of Ferdousi, Saadi, Hafiz, and Omar Khayam. Broadly speaking, Persian is the language of the Middle East. The language is associated not only with the land of pistachio nuts, Persian cats, and Afghan greyhounds but also with the region of increasing international focus and tension. Historically, the language can be divided into three main periods: Old Persian, represented by the Achamenid cuneiform inscriptions; Middle Persian, represented mostly by the Zoroastrian "Pahlavi" books, the Sasanian inscriptions and the Manichaean texts discovered in Central Asia; and New Persian, the language of Mohammedan times written in the Arabic script.
Unlike Tajiki, which is normally written in the Cyrillic script, Dari and Farsi are written in a variant of Arabic script known as Perso-Arabic. To account for Persian-language sounds that do not exist in Arabic, four letters were added to the standard Arabic script to form the Perso-Arabic script. Persian was first written in Perso-Arabic script following the Islamic conquest of Persia in the seventh century. Despite being written in a variant of the Arabic script and having borrowed many words from Arabic, Dari is not linguistically related to Arabic. Note that the writing system is completely unlike English, in part because it is read from right to left. The following grammar review is intended to familiarize you with the structure of the Dari language and the conversation of average Afghan people and no more. Dari grammar is fairly simple. Gender, noun inflection, agreement of adjectives, irregular verb conjugations - all of those things that can be so challenging to learn in some languages-are absent from Dari. However, the syntax (the ordering of words in a sentence) of Dari is fixed and therefore important.
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