Dari


Dari or Dari Persian or synonymously Farsi, is a political term referring to all the varieties of the Persian language spoken in Afghanistan. Dari is the term officially recognized and promoted since 1964 by the Afghan government for the Persian language, hence, it is also known as Afghan Persian in many Western sources. This has resulted in a naming dispute.
As defined in the Constitution of Afghanistan, it is one of the two official languages of Afghanistan; the other is Pashto. Dari is the most widely spoken language in Afghanistan and the native language of approximately 25–50% of the population. However Dari Persian serves as the lingua franca of the country and is understood by up to 80% of the population. Iranian Persian and Dari Persian are mutually intelligible, with differences found primarily in the vocabulary and phonology.
By way of Early New Persian, Dari Persian, like Iranian Persian and Tajik, is a continuation of Middle Persian, the official religious and literary language of the Sassanian Empire, itself a continuation of Old Persian, the language of the Achaemenids. In historical usage, Dari refers to the Middle Persian court language of the Sassanids.

Name

Dari is a name given to the New Persian language since the 10th century, widely used in Arabic and Persian texts.
Since 1964, it has been the official name in Afghanistan for the Persian spoken there. In Afghanistan, Dari refers to a modern dialect form of Persian that is the standard language used in administration, government, radio, television, and print media. Because of a preponderance of Dari native speakers, who normally refer to the language as Farsi, it is also known as "Afghan Persian" in some Western sources.
There are different opinions about the origin of the word Dari. The majority of scholars believes that Dari refers to the Persian word dar or darbār, meaning "Court", as it was the formal language of the Sassanids. The original meaning of the word dari is given in a notice attributed to Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ. 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. As for Dari, he says, "it is the language of the cities of Madā'en; it is spoken by those who are at the king’s court. is connected with presence at court. Among the languages of the people of Khorasan and the east, the language of the people of Balkh is predominant."
The Dari language spoken in Afghanistan is not to be confused with the language of Iran called Dari or Gabri, which is a language of the Central Iranian subgroup spoken in some Zoroastrian communities.

History

Dari comes from Middle Persian which was spoken during the rule of the Sassanid dynasty. In general, Iranian languages are known from three periods, usually referred to as Old, Middle, and New periods. These correspond to three eras in Iranian history, the old era being the period from some time before, during and after the Achaemenid period, the Middle Era being the next period, namely, the Sassanid period and part of the post-Sassanid period, and the New era being the period afterwards down to the present day.
But it is thought that the first person in Europe to use the term Deri for Dari was Thomas Hyde, at Oxford, in his chief work, Historia religionis veterum Persarum.
Dari or Deri has two meanings:
Translation according to literature and poetry:
Even though in euphonious Hindi* is sugar –
Rhyme method in Dari is sweeter *
Qandi Parsi or is a metaphor for the Persian language and poetry.
This poem is a poetic statement of the poet Iqbal with respect to the poetry of the 14th century Persian poet Hafez:
English translation:
Persian replaced the Central Asian languages of the Eastern Iranics. Ferghana, Samarkand, and Bukhara were starting to be linguistically Darified in originally Khorezmian and Soghdian areas during Samanid rule. Dari Persian spread around the Oxus River region, Afghanistan, and Khorasan after the Arab conquests and during Islamic-Arab rule. 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 Khorasan. The Dari Persian language spread and led to the extinction of Eastern Iranian languages like Bactrian, Khwarezmian with only a tiny amount of Sogdian descended Yaghnobi speakers remaining among the now Persian-speaking Tajik population of Central Asia, due to the fact that the Arab-Islamic army which invaded Central Asia also included some Persians who governed the region like the Sassanids. Persian was rooted into Central Asia by the Samanids. Persian phased out Sogdian. The role of lingua franca that Sogdian originally played was succeeded by Persian after the arrival of Islam.
Persian was a major language of government and diplomacy until the middle of the 1700s. Subsequently the strength of Persia declined relative to the industrializing states of Europe.

Table of the important terms of the Persian poets

This table gives information how many times the poets of the Persian literature wrote the terms Iran, Turan, Parsi, Farsi, Dari, Khorassan and Pahlevi. It is worth mentioning that many of Nazm i Dari or Dastan i Dari, Tarz e Guftar e Dari have spoken. Nazm and Nassir and درامه - the three genres of literature. New Persian literature begins with Poems of Rudaki.
Name of Poet of PersiancenturyUse of IranUse of TuranParsiFarsiDariGreater KhorasanPahlavi
Rudaki9th and 10th16
Farrukhi Sistani9th 10th16115 Parsa’i101
Abū-Sa'īd Abul-Khayr10th12
Ferdowsi10th and 11th800 +150 +100+22529
Asadi Tusi11th51511 loghat ye fors =
Masud Sa'd Salman11th23219Nazm o Nassr Dari13
Manuchehri11th534
Fakhruddin As'ad Gurgani11th151012 Parsa’i21283
Nasir Khusraw11 th11192792
Mahsati11th and 12th11
Anwari12th1332120
Khaqani12th21412 Nazm e Dari40180
Nizami Ganjavi12 th372123 Nazm and Dastan256
Amir Khusrow13 th 14th27613
Saadi Shirazi13th116+7
Rumi13 th 14th11296
Hafez14th692 Nazm ye Dari
Ubayd Zakani14th1141
Muhtasham Kashani16th12934
Saib Tabrizi17th10735
Muhammad Iqbal19th-Died 193819431 Tarz e1
Parvin Etesami19th/died 19412Parsa’i

Geographical distribution

Dari is one of the two official languages of Afghanistan. In practice though, it serves as the de facto lingua franca among the various ethno-linguistic groups.
Dari is spoken natively by about twenty-five percent to about eighty percent population of Afghanistan as a primary language. Tajiks, who comprise approximately 27% of the population, are the primary speakers, followed by Hazaras and Aymāqs. Moreover, many Pashtuns living in Tajik and Hazara concentrated areas also use Dari as a first language. The World Factbook states that eighty percent of the Afghan population speaks the Dari language. About 2.5 million Afghans in Iran and Afghans in Pakistan, part of the wider Afghan diaspora, also speak Dari as one of their primary languages.
Dari dominates the northern, western and central areas of Afghanistan, and is the common language spoken in cities such as Mazar-i-Sharif, Herat, Fayzabad, Panjshir, Bamiyan, and the Afghan capital of Kabul where all ethnic groups are settled. Dari-speaking communities also exist in southwestern and eastern Pashtun-dominated areas such as in the cities of Ghazni, Farah, Zaranj, Lashkar Gah, Kandahar, and Gardez.

Cultural influence

Dari has contributed to the majority of Persian borrowings in other Asian languages, such as Urdu, Hindi, Punjabi, Bengali, etc., as it was the administrative, official, cultural language of the Persianate Mughal Empire and served as the lingua franca throughout the South Asian subcontinent for centuries. Often based in Afghanistan, Turkic Central Asian conquerors brought the language into South Asia. The basis in general for the introduction of Persian language into the subcontinent was set, from its earliest days, by various Persianized Central Asian Turkic and Afghan dynasties. The sizable Persian component of the Anglo-Indian loan words in English and in Urdu therefore reflects the Dari pronunciation. For instance, the words dopiaza and pyjama come from the Dari pronunciation; in Iranian Persian they are pronounced do-piyāzeh and pey-jāmeh. Persian lexemes and certain morphological elements have often been employed to coin words for political and cultural concepts, items, or ideas that were historically unknown outside the South Asian region, as is the case with the aforementioned "borrowings". The Dari language has a rich and colorful tradition of proverbs that deeply reflect Afghan culture and relationships, as demonstrated by U.S. Navy Captain Edward Zellem in his bilingual books on Afghan Dari proverbs collected in Afghanistan.

Differences between Iranian and Afghan Persian

There are phonological, lexical, and morphological differences between Afghan Persian and Iranian Persian. There are no significant differences in the written forms, other than regional idiomatic phrases.

Phonological differences

The principal differences between standard Iranian Persian, based on the dialect of the capital Tehran, and Afghan Persian, as based on the Kabul dialect, are:
  1. The merging of majhul vowels and into and respectively in Iranian Persian, whereas in Afghan Persian, they are still kept separate. For instance, the identically written words شیر 'lion' and 'milk' are pronounced the same in Iranian Persian as, but for 'lion' and for 'milk' in Afghan Persian. The long vowel in زود "quick" and زور "strong" is realized as in Iranian Persian, in contrast, these words are pronounced and respectively by Persian speakers in Afghanistan.
  2. The treatment of the diphthongs of early Classical Persian "aw" and "ay", which are pronounced and in Iranian Persian. Dari, on the other hand, is more archaic, e.g. نوروز 'Persian New Year' is realized as in Iranian and in Afghan Persian, and نخیر 'no' is in Iranian and in Afghan Persian. Moreover, is simplified to in normal Iranian speech, thereby merging with the short vowel . This does not occur in Afghan Persian.
  3. The high short vowels and tend to be lowered in Iranian Persian to and, unlike are in Dari where they might have both high and lowered allophones.
  4. The pronunciation of the labial consonant, which is realized as a voiced labiodental fricative, but Afghan Persian still retains the bilabial pronunciation ; is found in Afghan Persian as an allophone of before voiced consonants and as variation of in some cases, along with.
  5. The convergence of voiced uvular stop and voiced velar fricative in Iranian Persian, is still kept separate in Dari.
  6. The realization of short final "a" as in Iranian Persian.
  7. The realization of short non-final "a" as in Iranian Persian.
  8. and in word-final positions are separate in Dari, is a word-final allophone of in Iranian Persian.

    Dialect continuum

The dialects of Dari spoken in Northern, Central and Eastern Afghanistan, for example in Kabul, Mazar, and Badakhshan, have distinct features compared to Iranian Persian. However, the dialect of Dari spoken in Western Afghanistan stands in between the Afghan and Iranian Persian. For instance, the Herati dialect shares vocabulary and phonology with both Dari and Iranian Persian. Likewise, the dialect of Persian in Eastern Iran, for instance in Mashhad, is quite similar to the Herati dialect of Afghanistan.
The Kabuli dialect has become the standard model of Dari in Afghanistan, as has the Tehrani dialect in relation to the Persian in Iran. Since the 1940s, Radio Afghanistan has broadcast its Dari programs in Kabuli Dari, which ensured the homogenization between the Kabuli version of the language and other dialects of Dari spoken throughout Afghanistan. Since 2003, the media, especially the private radio and television broadcasters, have carried out their Dari programs using the Kabuli variety.

Phonology

Consonants

FrontBack
High
Mid
Low

Successive governments of Afghanistan have promoted New Persian as an official language of government since the time of the Delhi Sultanate, even as those governments were dominated by Pashtun people. Sher Ali Khan of the Barakzai dynasty first introduced the Pashto language as an additional language of administration. The local name for the Persian variety spoken in Afghanistan was officially changed from Farsi to Dari, meaning "court language", in 1964. Zaher said there would be, as there are now, two official languages, Pashto and Farsi, though the latter would henceforth be named Dari. Within their respective linguistic boundaries, Dari and Pashto are the media of education.