I have half a dozen Farsi-speaking acquaintances, a Farsi dictionary, and I’ve done the four-CD Farsi language set once. In Afganistan it’s known as Dari and in Tajikistan as Tajik. Many Hindi words are directly borrowed from Farsi over the last millennium due to influx of Farsi, and it being the court language of the subcontinent for centuries. Hello!! Obviously, all kinds of swearwords fit into this category as well. In standard Persian, the verb always comes at the end of the sentence. Secondly, spoken Persian often omits prepositions. Swahili is inching towards Kiswahili. ( Log Out /  However, people use colloquial spoken Persian in everyday conversation. Kidding. The particle “de” (ده) indicates strong feelings or emotions, or vague surprise. Create a free website or blog at WordPress.com. Persian is a word that has been used in English language for thousands of years to refer to not just a language, but also to Persian culture and to a country that was once a great empire that controlled many different nations of modern times. Most people in Iran understand the Tehrani accent. The country that is today Iran was a part of this large empire that was called Persia. If it irritated them, they’d say so. For example, to say “What are you doing?” or “What is this?” you can simply say chekaar mikoni? Regarding this sentence: The English equivalent is things like “bibs and bobs”, the English equivalent is actually ‘bits and bobs’ as in bits of things. To sum up, Farsi is the most common dialect of Persian language and spoken by most people of Persian origin. Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in: You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Persian, also known as Farsi is an Indo-Iranian language of the Indo-European language family. There are Iranians who say “Farsi”, and if they say “Farsi” first, I’m going to too. If you speak a Latin-derived language like French or Spanish, this sentence structure may be familiar to you when object particles are used, like “I don’t want it” (French: Je ne le veux pas, Spanish: No lo quiero). This is really great!!! Get regular posts on language learning, global culture, and distant destinations. Dari is also called Farsi in Afghanistan while it is mostly referred to as Farsi in Iran. Everybody else spoke whatever they spoke. Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email. Farsi is also called western Persian, whereas Dari is Eastern Persian, and Tajik is Tajik Persian. When people of minorities speak standard Persian, they try to eliminate their accent (and words from other languages). Posted on May 6, 2013 by languageomnivore. Are Persians Arabs? Or “My hovercraft is full of eels” becomes “هاورکرافت من پر مارماهى است” (hâvercrâft-e man por-e mârmâhi ast), which is literally “My hovercraft full of eels is“. They’re not considered prestigious and have declined in recent years. I’m still smarting a bit for having been taken to task at NCOLCTL (National Council of Less Commonly Taught Languages) for asking a prominent professor of Persian: “How long have you been teaching Farsi?” His response was “Persian, not Farsi” and that the community is “sensitive about the subject”. People use written (formal) Persian in books, newspapers, the news, formal speeches, and poetry. They’re two names for the same thing. This happens mostly with the verb “to be”, just as it happens in English and French (e.g. There you go, that’s all the colloquial language you need to know. Colloquial and written Persian are different enough to where if you’ve just studied written Persian, you wouldn’t understand colloquial Persian right off the bat. Or to “huff and puff” rather than just “huffing”. Persian, also known as Farsi is an Indo-Iranian language of the Indo-European language family. But otherwise, you have to get used to modern Persian’s sentence structure. The staccato sound comes from even less willingness in Dari to have adjacent consonants than in Farsi. It’s even spoken sometimes in Afghanistan from cross-border migration, and from the influence of Iranian media. This can be confusing to the language speaker. Clumsy anglicizations like Owhyhee, Chippewa, and Oordoo have over time become Hawaiian, Ojibwa, and Urdu. It’s why I…. . Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window), Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window), Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window), Click to email this to a friend (Opens in new window), Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window), Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window), A Brief Hiatus and a new intro to Vietnamese. It is a pluricentric language predominantly spoken and used officially within Iran, Afghanistan and Tajikistan in three mutually intelligible standard varieties, namely Iranian Persian, Dari Persian (officially named Dari since 1958) and Tajiki Persian (officially named Tajik since the Sovietera). What Are The Different Forms of Spoken Persian? Aside from all that, in spoken Persian a few random words change in pronunciation: Aside from word order, there are a few other grammar modifications in spoken Persian that aren’t in the written form. The language uses a variant of the Arabic alphabet, but as you’ll soon learn, another form of Persian uses a different writing system entirely. The present tense of many other verbs is contracted in spoken Persian. For example, the definite direct object marker raa (را) is pronounced colloquially as –o, or –ro if the noun ends in a vowel or if it has the contrastive marker -e. This is just to make it easier to speak quickly. Colloquial Persian is pretty universal in Iran, but varies between regions and countries. It’s why Persians can’t say “spaghetti” without it sounding like “espaguetti”. In fact, Persian was the official language of the Muslim rulers in Indian subcontinent before the arrival of the British. Persians are not Arabs. Those ethnic groups have other first languages, so their versions of Persian are influenced by those. The English equivalent is things like “bits and bobs” for various miscellaneous items, rather than just saying “bits” (whatever a “bob” is, anyway). For example, to say “I went home”, the correct structure is to say “I to home went” (من به خانه رفتم). Look for it next year. This isn’t because the spelling is weird, it’s just how verbs are used in conversation. But a few common examples I hear in Persian are: Lastly, colloquial Persian has a lot of slang, just like any other modern language. In this article, Dari is referred to as the accent spoken in Afghanistan and Farsi is referred to as the accent spoken in Iran. Finally, Tehrani Persian has actually gone beyond being just a spoken form: you can often see it in written form. In Afganistan it’s known as … There are three main dialects of Persian. Either politics isn’t in the picture or it’s in the picture for some Iranians and not others or it’s only part of the picture for everybody. If a Yazdi or Mashhadi person visits Tehran he/she will probably speak Tehrani; the opposite is rare. Change ), You are commenting using your Twitter account. This is related to the modified simplified word order in spoken Persian. A speaker of one with no knowledge of the other could pick up a newspaper and see major words and roughly know what topic was about, but not know in detail, nor be able to understand the details. Our goal is to bring you closer to places and people that would otherwise seem foreign by providing guides to studying languages, understanding culture, and living in unfamiliar places. They say things like “‘Farsi’ isn’t an English word”. Dari and Farsi are two accents of the same language. I have so rarely said that out loud. Before one or two of those came along “countries” consisted of capital cities plus a few regions; the language of the capital was passed off by writers (a literate bunch, them) as the country’s language. What’s the difference between Persian and Farsi? Persian has around 70 million native speakers in Iran, Afganistan and Tajikistan. Finally, there’s a lot of contraction in spoken Persian. Persian , also known by its endonym Farsi (فارسی, Fārsī, [fɒːɾˈsiː] (listen)), is a Western Iranian language belonging to the Iranian branch of the Indo-Iranian subdivision of the Indo-European languages. In the Persian version of this sentence, you could just use the translation for “why” (چرا, chera), but it would sound much more natural if you said chera mage (چرا مگر). Secondly, in spoken Persian, a few slightly cumbersome letter combinations are simplified. Persian has around 70 million native speakers in Iran, Afganistan and Tajikistan. But if you put a deh in front of it, it emphasises the shock you’re seeing that prompted the question. The similarity is a bit like that between English and French. Persian-Farsi, or Western Persian. I also know who I learned it from! If you want to learn spoken Persian and have freedom of choice, you should probably learn the Tehrani style. 2 Comments. I’m still smarting a bit for having been taken to task at NCOLCTL (National Council of Less Commonly Taught Languages) for asking a prominent professor of Persian: “How long have you been teaching Farsi?” His response was “Persian, not Farsi” and that the community is “sensitive about the subject”. But I’ve never experienced quite so much passion on the subject without (so far at least) an obvious explanation of why. Awesome free resources for learning Egyptian Arabic, including a dictionary, idioms and learning with music. Colloquial Persian also uses reduplication a lot for emphasis, where they use a second made-up word stuck on to the original word. You can also see S-O-V structures in many other languages, like Korean (which is purely S-O-V), in German in simple structures (“Ich habe nicht deinen Apfel gegessen“), or Chinese when using the 把 particle (“我把你的苹果扔掉了”). I used to think that Cantonese was a difficult language to learn, but I’m coming to the conclusion that this is wrong. people usually say “I’m” rather than “I am”). Dari and Farsi are two accents of the same language. They re-create the whole thing from the ground up about once every 36 months — so everybody’s learning it all the time.