In this insightful study of Iranian cultural history and national identity, Shahrokh Meskoob, one of Iran's leading intellectuals, reviews the roles of three social classes, the courtiers and bureaucratic officials (ahl-e divan), the religious scholars (ulama), and the Muslim Gnostics (Sufi poets and writers), in the development and refinement of the Persian language during the past one thousand years and gives the reader a fresh perspective on Iranian cultural heritage and the struggle to forge a distinct national identity. Dr. Ali Banuazizi's foreword and interview with the author sets the stage for a fuller appreciation of this invaluable and wide-ranging contribution to Iranian intellectual history.

In this insightful study of Iranian cultural history and national identity, the late Shahrokh Meskoob, one of Iran's leading intellectuals, reviewed the roles of three social classes, the courtiers and bureaucratic officials (ahl-e divan), the religious scholars (ulama), and the Muslim Gnostics (Sufi poets and writers), in the development and refinement of the Persian language during the past 1,000 years and gives the reader a fresh perspective on Iranian cultural heritage and the struggle to forge a distinct national identity. Dr. Ali Banuazizi's foreword and interview with the author sets the stage for a fuller appreciation of this invaluable and wide-ranging contribution to Iranian intellectual history.

Persian, or Farsi, is one of the world's oldest languages. Dating back to the sixth century B.C., it is spoken today by over forty million people in Iran and 5 million in Afghanistan. This is the first comprehensive grammar of Persian and provides detailed coverage of all its linguistic aspects, including the syntax, morphology and phonology.

"This book is a full course in Persian Lite. It offers sophisticated insights into the language without requiring months of laborious study. The book will interest both general readers and language specialists, especially autodidacts who want to learn about the languages and cultures of the modern Middle East and Central Asia but do not have time for formal language instruction. The type of language and culture awareness the book promotes not only helps one understand the way millions of people communicate in Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, and Tajikistan, but it also fosters an awareness of basic features of Arabic, Hindi, Kashmiri, Pashto, and other languages that have either contributed to the development of modern Persian or have been influenced by it.".

This book describes the structure of modern Persia, showing the methods by which it conveys meaning in sentences and connected passages and illustrating its special characteristics. As an introduction there is a brief account of Persia, its inhabitants, their occupations and beliefs; some attempt is made also to show how the language has been modified by the events of Persian history. A section is devoted to representative writings.

The volume - of interest to students of Persian, Iranian philology, and comparative and general linguistics - contains fourteen papers that cover a diversity of themes relating to the history of the Persian language, including Middle Persian. Editions of so far unpublished texts and new language materials are also included. In Part I (Historical and descriptive grammar of Persian), Claudia A. Ciancaglini traces the formation of the periphrastic verbs of the "noun + kardan" type back to Indo-Iranian and suggests that such verbs in neighbouring non-Iranian languages are due to the influence of Persian and other Iranian languages; Judith Josephson surveys the devices developed in Middle Persian to convey various degrees of definiteness and deixis; Paola Orsatti recognises a deictic suffix -i in New Persian and documents its history in early and classical texts; and Gilbert Lazard provides a theoretical reference frame for the problem whether New Persian has one or more postnominal suffixes -i. In Part II (Middle Persian), Desmond Durkin-Meisterernst surveys the history of research on the Manichaean Middle Persian texts from Turfan; and Hassan Rezai Baghbidi offers a new edition and translation of the Middle Persian and Chinese inscription from Xi'an. In Part III (Non-standard New Persian), Elio Provasi provides an edition with translation, commentary, and glossary of seven unpublished New Persian fragments in Manichaean script from Turfan; Ela Filippone studies the language and translation techniques of the early dialectal translation of the so-called "Qor'an-e Qods"; David N. MacKenzie's unpublished index to the "Early Jewish-Persian argument" published by him in 1968 appears here posthumously; and Mauro Maggi and Paola Orsatti publish and translate two Persian hymns in Syriac script from manuscripts in the Mingana Collection. In Part IV (Literary New Persian), Mohammad Hasandust identifies and provides with an etymology eight words occurring in literary sources but so far ignored by Persian lexicography, and Riccardo Zipoli publishes a sample of a dictionary of obscene terms that, once completed, will assist in the study of texts tabooed on account of their vocabulary. In Part V (Dialectology), Gerardo Barbera offers an thorough presentation of the Minabi lexicon relating to the palm in comparison with other dialects of the area and with Persian, while Daniele Guizzo deals with Talesi terms for celestial bodies and weather phenomena and studies their position relative to neighbouring languages.

This book examines the sociolinguistics of some of Iran’s languages at home and in the diaspora. The first part of the book examines the politics of minority languages and the presence of hegemonic discourses which favour Persian (Farsi) in Iran, exploring issues such as language maintenance and shift, linguistic ideologies and practices among Azerbaijani and Kurdish-speaking communities. The authors then go on to examine Iranians’ linguistic ideologies, practices and (trans)national identity construction in the diaspora, investigating both the challenges of maintaining a home language and the strategies and linguistic repertoires employed when constructing a diasporic identity away from home. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of minority languages and communities, diaspora and migration studies, and language policy and planning.