“Persian language or Farsi Language: Iranian language spoken by more than 25 million people as a first language, and by millions more as a second. Modern Persian is a koine developed from southwestern dialects in the 7th-9th centuries, after the introduction of Islam brought a massive infusion of loanwords from Arabic. Its standardization and literary cultivation took place in northeastern Persia and Central Asia in the 11th-12th centuries. Polities outside Persia itself (e.g. Mughal India, Ottoman Turkey) have at times been major literary centers. Its status in those countries led to a very strong Persian influence on Urdu and Ottoman Turkish. Other Turkic and Indo-Aryan languages, Caucasian languages, and Iranian languages have also borrowed heavily from Persian. Like other Modern Iranian languages, Persian shows marked changes in sound structure from Old Iranian, as well as a drastic reduction in the repertoire of verbal forms and complete loss of case inflections for nouns and adjectives. It is written in a slightly modified form of the Arabic alphabet.”
Excerpted from: Stevens, Mark A., Ed. Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Encyclopedia. Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster, 2000.
Mark's Text Terminal 