It originated in the region of Pars ( Persia) in southwestern Iran. Modern Persian is a continuation of Middle Persian, an official language of the Sasanian Empire (224–651 CE), itself a continuation of Old Persian, which was used in the Achaemenid Empire (550–330 BCE).

It is written officially within Iran and Afghanistan in the Persian alphabet, a derivative of the Arabic script, and within Tajikistan in the Tajik alphabet, a derivative of the Cyrillic script. It is also spoken natively in the Tajik variety by a significant population within Uzbekistan, as well as within other regions with a Persianate history in the cultural sphere of Greater Iran. Persian is a pluricentric language predominantly spoken and used officially within Iran, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan in three mutually intelligible standard varieties, namely Iranian Persian (officially known as Persian), Dari Persian (officially known as Dari since 1964) and Tajiki Persian (officially known as Tajik since 1999).

Persian ( / ˈ p ɜːr ʒ ən, - ʃ ən/), also known by its endonym Farsi ( فارسی, Fārsī, ( listen)), is a Western Iranian language belonging to the Iranian branch of the Indo-Iranian subdivision of the Indo-European languages. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols.

O fficial ACTFL OPIs are currently available in the following languages (but are subject to change):Īfrikaans, Akan-Twi, Albanian, Algerian (ILR only), Amharic, Arabic (MSA), Armenian, Assyrian, Azerbaijani, Baluchi, Bengali, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Burmese, Cambodian, Cantonese, Cebuano, Chavacano, Chechen, Czech, Danish, Dari, Dutch, Egyptian (ILR only), English, Finnish, French, Ga, Georgian, German, Greek (Modern), Gujarati, Haitian Creole, Hausa, Hebrew, Hindi, Hmong/Mong, Hungarian, Igbo, llocano, Indonesian, Iraqi (ILR only), Italian, Japanese, Javanese, Jordanian (ILR only), Kazakh, Kikongo, Kinyarwanda, Korean, Krio, Kurdish, Lao, Lebanese (ILR only), Levantine (ILR only), Lingala, Malay, Malayalam, Mandarin, Mandingo-Bambara, Mongolian, Moroccan (ILR only), Nepali, Norwegian, Palestinian (ILR only), Pashto, Persian Farsi, Polish, Portuguese, Punjabi, Quechua, Romanian, Russian, Serbian/Croatian, Sindhi, Sinhalese, Slovak, Somali, Spanish, Sudanese (ILR only), Swahili, Swedish, Tagalog, Tajik, Tamil, Tausug, Telugu, Thai, Tigrinya, Turkish, Turkmen, Uighur, Urdu, Uzbek, Vietnamese, Wolof, Yemeni (ILR only), Yoruba, and Zulu.This article contains Persian text.

Pashto Dari grammar pdf