New Persian

Final stage classification of the Persian language

| agency =
Academy of Persian Language and Literature (Iran)
Academy of Sciences of Afghanistan (Afghanistan)
Rudaki Institute of Language and Literature (Tajikistan)

| iso1 = fa
| iso2b = per
| iso2t = fas
| iso3 = fas
| lingua =
| image = Farsi. svg
| imagescale = 0.5
| imagecaption = Fārsi written in Persian calligraphy (Nastaʿlīq)
| map = Persian Language Location Map. svgborder
| mapcaption = Areas with significant numbers of people whose first language is Persian (including dialects)
| map2 = Map of Persian speakers. svgborder
| mapcaption2 = Persian Linguasphere. Legend

| notice = IPA
| listclass = hlist
| glotto = fars1254
| glottorefname = Farsic Caucasian Tat

New Persian (فارسی نو), also known as Modern Persian (فارسی نوین) is the current stage of the Persian language spoken since the 8th to 9th centuries until now in Greater Iran and surroundings. It is conventionally divided into three stages: Early New Persian (8th/9th centuries), Classical Persian (10th–18th centuries), and Contemporary Persian (19th century to present). Dari is a name given to the New Persian language since the 10th century, widely used in Arabic (see Istakhri, al Maqdisi and ibn Hawqal) and Persian texts. Since 1964, Dari has been the official name in Afghanistan for the Persian spoken there.

New Persian is a member of the Western Iranian group of the Iranian languages, which make up a branch of the Indo European languages in their Indo Iranian subdivision. The Western Iranian languages themselves are divided into two subgroups: Southwestern Iranian languages, of which Persian is the most widely spoken, and Northwestern Iranian languages, of which Kurdish is the most widely spoken.

"New Persian" is the name given to the final stage of development of Persian language. The term Persian is an English derivation of Latin Persiānus, the adjectival form of Persia, itself deriving from Greek (Περσίς), a Hellenized form of Old Persian (𐎱𐎠𐎼𐎿), which means "Persia" (a region in southwestern Iran corresponding to modern day Fars province). According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term Persian as a language name is first attested in English in the mid 16th century. There are different opinions about the origin of the word Dari. The majority of scholars believes Dari refers to the Persian word dar or darbār "court" (دربار) as it was the formal language of the Sasanian dynasty. The original meaning of the word dari is given in a notice attributed to Ibn al Muqaffaʿ (cited by Ibn al Nadim in Al Fehrest). According to him, "Pārsī was the language spoken by priests, scholars, and the like; it is the language of Fars." This language refers to the Middle Persian.

New Persian texts written in the Arabic script first appear in the 9th century. The language is a direct descendant of Middle Persian, the official, religious and literary language of the Sasanian Empire (224–651). However, it is not descended from the literary form of Middle Persian (known as pārsīk, commonly called Pahlavi), which was spoken by the people of Fars and used in Zoroastrian religious writings. Instead, it is descended from the dialect spoken by the court of the Sasanian capital Ctesiphon and the northeastern Iranian region of Khorasan, known as Dari. Khorasan, which was the homeland of the Parthians, was Persianized under the Sasanians. Dari Persian thus supplanted Parthian language, which by the end of the Sasanian era had fallen out of use. New Persian has incorporated many foreign words, including from eastern northern and northern Iranian languages such as Sogdian and especially Parthian. The mastery of the newer speech having now been transformed from Middle into New Persian was already complete by the era of the three princely dynasties of Iranian origin, the Tahirid dynasty (820–872), Saffarid dynasty (860–903) and Samanid Empire (874–999), and could develop only in range and power of expression. Abbas of Merv is mentioned as being the earliest minstrel to chant verse in the newer Persian tongue and after him the poems of Hanzala Badghisi were among the most famous between the Persian speakers of the time. The first poems of the Persian language, a language historically called Dari, emerged in Afghanistan. The first significant Persian poet was Rudaki. He flourished in the 10th century, when the Samanids were at the height of their power. His reputation as a court poet and as an accomplished musician and singer has survived, although little of his poetry has been preserved. Among his lost works are versified fables collected in the Kalila wa Dimna. The language spread geographically from the 11th century on and was the medium through which among others, Central Asian Turks became familiar with Islam and urban culture. New Persian was widely used as a trans regional lingua franca, a task for which it was particularly suitable due to its relatively simple morphological structure and this situation persisted until at least the 19th century. In the late Middle Ages, new Islamic literary languages were created on the Persian model: Ottoman Turkish, Chagatai, Dobhashi and Urdu, which are regarded as "structural daughter languages" of Persian. Persian during this time served as lingua franca of Greater Persia and of much of the Indian subcontinent. It was also the official and cultural language of many Islamic dynasties, including the Samanids, Buyids, Tahirids, Ziyarids, the Mughal Empire, Timurids, Ghaznavids, Karakhanids, Seljuqs, Khwarazmians, the Sultanate of Rum, Delhi Sultanate, the Shirvanshahs, Safavids, Afsharids, Zands, Qajars, Khanate of Bukhara, Khanate of Kokand, Emirate of Bukhara, Khanate of Khiva, Ottomans and also many Mughal successors such as the Nizam of Hyderabad. Persian was the only non European language known and used by Marco Polo at the Court of Kublai Khan and in his journeys through China.

Standard Persian is the standard variety of Persian that is the official language of the Iran and Tajikistan and one of the two official languages of Afghanistan. It is a set of spoken and written formal varieties used by the educated persophones of several nations around the world. As Persian is a pluricentric language, Standard Persian encompasses various linguistic norms (consisting of prescribed usage). Standard Persian practically has three standard varieties with official status in Iran, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan. The standard forms of the three are based on the Tehrani, Kabuli, and Bukharan varieties, respectively.