About Persian Language

In this post, you would read more details about the Persian language.

Content:

Persian Speakers

Persian Script

Persian Keyboard Layout

Persian Speakers:

Today, modern Persian is spoken by around 110 million people of which 70 million are Native speakers.  Farsi is an official language in Afghanistan (as Dari),  Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan (as Tajik) and is understood in parts of Azerbaijan, Turkey, Armenia, Georgia, India, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, and Turkmenistan. In 2021 the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Iran published new statistics showing that 4,037,258 Iranians are currently living abroad. [**]

In summary, there are three standard varieties of modern Persian:

• Iranian Persian (Persian, Western Persian, or Farsi) is spoken in Iran, and by minorities in Iraq and the Persian Gulf states.
• Eastern Persian (Dari Persian, Afghan Persian, or Dari) is spoken in Afghanistan.
• Tajiki (Tajik Persian) is spoken in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. It is written in the Cyrillic script.

Iranian Persian has several accents, including Esfahani, Shirazi, Tehrani, and Yazdi, Mashhadi, which are all mutually intelligible. The Tehrani dialect, which is considered to be the standard dialect, is spoken by most Iranian speakers and used in pop music.

Persian Script:

Persian was written in Pahlavi script until the introduction of Islam in Iran in 637 AD, when Arabic script was adopted (actually a modified version of the Arabic alphabet) ^[1], except in Zoroastrian sacred literature.[*]. Afterward, most of its structure and vocabulary survived, evolving into New Persian. However, Persian did incorporate a certain amount of Arabic vocabulary.

Although Farsi uses the Arabic system of writing and has borrowed a large amount of its vocabulary, Persian has no grammatical similarities to Arabic because it belongs to a different language family; the Indo-European family. 

Now let's learn a couple of basic things about the Persian script. 

1- Unlike the Latin script, it is written from the right.

2- Persian script is Cursive and a modified abjad; where short consonants and long vowels are represented by letters but short vowels and consonant length are not generally indicated in writing.

3- It does not have capital letters. This means that both proper names and ordinary nouns are written with the same letter-forms.

4- The three short vowels a, e, o, are not written. In textbooks for beginners, you will have these sounds indicated by special signs placed above the letters.

Let me put it this way: If you consider each word as a Person, short vowels would be her stories. Once you're two introduced at a party, you'll need to remember how she is pronounced for the next meeting. For example, take this word: اَنار (anār) which means "pomegranate". Once you learn that اَ at the beginning of the word is "zebar", you'll always remember that this word is pronounced 'anār'; not 'enār' nor 'onār'!

 Thus in most cases, you would only tell how to pronounce a word correctly only if you two have met earlier somewhere or by its context.

Direction and Word Order in Persian:

Persian Keyboard:

There are two keyboard layouts for the Persian language out there. 

• • Persian *
  • Persian (Standard)¹

If you are using Windows; your keyboard layout for Farsi would be the same that Microsoft designed for Windows. I have also used it for years. But, the default Persian keyboard layout is different from the Iranian national standard keyboard layout.

If you frequently write in Persian, I ould highly recommend you to switch to the standard keyboard. Why?

Differences between a standard Persian keyboard and a Microsoft Persian keyboard layout:

1. 1. You can write numbers correctly in Persian (۱۲۳۴۵۶۷۸۹۰).
   2. " ⇧ Shift and Space" is equal to ZWNJ (The zero-width non-joiner) or half distance (Example:می‌کند the space between می and کند).
   3. " ⇧ Shift and -" is different from Underscore or Underline and is the distance stretch (Example: لیوان خالی and لیـوان خـالـی).
   4. "ی" and "ک" are Persian (without two dots below "ی"  and without a comma on "ک").
   5. "پ" is on the key M.
   6. "ژ" is on " ⇧ Shift and C".
   7. The comma (ویرگول) is on " ⇧ Shift and 7".
   8. and so on.(+)

Download the standard Persian keyboard from here and open the "zip" file and save it somewhere. Go to the save and double click on setup.exe and perform the installation steps.  This is also the default layout foق Dari (Afghanistan)

Note: The name of the old non-standard Windows keyboard is "Persian" and the name of the new keyboard is "Iranian Standard Persian". It is recommended that you delete the non-standard keyboard and stop using it. You should also use Left Alt+ ⇧ Shift to convert keyboards between languages ​​from now on. It is not easy for the first couple of days. I write both in English and Persian every single day. Forgetting where "پ" could be was time-consuming and annoying for me. But it was all worth it. 

Persian keyboard on Mac

Full Persian language support is available on Mac OS 10 operating system . Here are the steps to activate it:

1. In the Apple menu, System Preferences, select the option.
2. Select the option Language & Textmarked with the UN flag symbol from the first line.
3. (Input Sources)Click the fourth tab .
4. In the list of languages, there are several options for Persian that are marked with the role of the Iranian flag. Select the keyboard Persian ISIRI 2901marked with the Iranian flag.
5. Show input menu in menubarClick on the option to the right of the list of languages . Persian language can now be selected through the menu at the top of the page (right).

In a nutshell, if you use the Persian keyboard frequently, say goodbye to the old one and get the Standard one right now. 

Check Persian spelling by Chrome

Chrome browser can check Persian spelling after updating to version 51. To enable this feature, just follow these steps:

• chrome://help/Enter Chrome in the URL field and make sure you have version 51 or higher (if not, it will be updated automatically).
• By going to the address chrome://settings/languages, by selecting the spell check option for the Persian language, you can use the Chrome spell checking tool.

Is your typing speed low? Try Speech to text

If you do not have access to a suitable Persian keyboard or your typing speed is low, you can use software and text-to-speech plugins, one of which works well is VoiceNote II , which can be installed and used in Chrome browser.

1-The replacement of the Pahlavi script with the Arabic script in order to write the Persian language was done by the Tahirids in 9th century Khurasan.