fārsi
Native Speakers: 70 million; L2 Speakers: 40 million (110 million total speakers)
Middle East, Central Asia, Caucasus region
Official: Iran, Afghanistan (known as Dari), Tajikistan (known as Tajik)
Indo-European, Indo-Iranian, Western Iranian
Subject-object-verb (SOV) word order. Has evolved into an analytical language, with fewer cases and no grammatical gender. Pronouns can be dropped when they can be inferred. Adjectives follow the noun that they modify and verbs are highly regular, inflected for three singular and three plural persons. The most common tenses are infinitive, past, imperfect, perfect, pluperfect, future, present, present subjunctive. Definite articles are absent in the literary language but are inferred by the lack of an indefinite article. Farsi vocabulary is frequently formed through compounding and agglutination. Most vocabulary is derived from Middle Persian with a significant number of loanwords originating from Arabic (and which were later “Persianized.”
The three major dialects of Persian (Farsi) are Western Persian (spoken in Iran and by some minority groups in the Gulf Region), Dari (spoken in Afghanistan), and Tajik (spoken in Tajikistan). There are also multiple dialects of lesser diffusion and related languages with varying degrees of mutual intelligibility.
Persian (modified Arabic script), written right-to-left
According to the American Community Survey, there are roughly 440,000 speakers of Farsi in the United States (including Dari from Afghanistan), making it the 18th most spoken language in the United States. The largest communities of Persian-Americans are found in the state of California (roughly half of the Persian population in the U.S.), New York, New Jersey, and Washington, D.C.
At Latitude Prime, we offer Farsi (Persian) translation, Farsi (Persian) interpretation, and Farsi (Persian) localization services in numerous specialized subject areas and multiple dialects. Whether you need to translate a rental agreement from Farsi into English, need a Farsi interpreter for a legal deposition, or want to localize your website into Farsi to market your products or services to Persian communities in the United States, Latitude Prime has the customized language solution to meet all of your Farsi (Persian) language needs.
