User:HistoryofIran/New Persian

New Persian, is the final stage of the Persian language spoken since the 8th century 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 Modern Persian (19th century to present).

History
New Persian 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. The region, which comprised the present territories of northwestern Afghanistan as well as parts of Central Asia, played a leading role in the rise of New Persian. 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.

Reports by Muslim writers such as Ibn al-Muqaffa (died 759/760) and al-Tabari (died 923) indicate that the city of Balkh was a stronghold for the Persian language and culture during the early Islamic period.

Following the Abbasid Revolution (747–750) led by the Iranian general Abu Muslim (died 755), Iran was incorporated into the newly established Abbasid Caliphate. By the mid-9th-century, the caliphate started declining, eventually breaking into several virtually independent kingdoms. It was during this period the "literary reawakening" of Persian in eastern Iran occurred, at the courts of the emerging Iranian Saffarid and Samanid dynasties.

The Samanids had since 819 governed Transoxiana on behalf of the caliphate. Under Ismail Samani ((r. 829 – 907)), the Samanids became independent, and also seized Khorasan from the Saffarid dynasty.

Persian texts written in the Arabic script first appear in the 9th-century. With the reunification of Iran by Seljuk Empire in the mid 11th-century, eastern Persian literature had a better opportunity to sway the western provinces.

During the late Sasanian era, the three major Iranian languages of Iran were; Pahlavi, spoken in central and northwestern Iran, corresponding to the ancient region of Media; Dari, spoken at the court of the capital Ctesiphon and the eastern region of Khorasan; and Parsi, spoken by the people of Fars and used in Zoroastrian religious writings.

Vocabulary
While the difference between Old Persian and Middle Persian can be compared to that of Latin and French, New Persian preserved many of its similarities with Middle Persian. The vocabulary of New Persian, however, has notably diverged from Middle Persian. New Persian has incorporated many foreign words, including from eastern northern and northern Iranian languages such as Sogdian and especially Parthian. New Persian also incorporated a large number of Arabic words, a transition which lasted centuries. In 9th and 10th centuries, Arabic constituted 20–30% of the Persian vocabulary, and in the 11th and 12th-centuries it constituted around 50%.