Dar? (Dari: ???? [da'?i:]) or Dari Persian (????? ??? F?rs?-ye Dar? [f?:?sije da'?i:]) or synonymously Farsi (????? F?rs? [f?:?si:]) is the variety 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. Many Persian speakers in Afghanistan prefer and use the name "Farsi" and say the term Dari has been forced on them by the dominant Pashtun ethnic group as an attempt to distance Afghans from their cultural, linguistic, and historical ties to the Persian-speaking world, which includes Iran and Tajikistan.
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 15-30% of the population, serving as the country's lingua franca. The Iranian and Afghan types of 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 (224-651 CE), itself a continuation of Old Persian, the language of the Achaemenids (550-330 BC). In historical usage, Dari refers to the Middle Persian court language of the Sassanids.
Video Dari language
Name
Dari is a name given to the New Persian language since the 10th century, widely used in Arabic (compare Al-Estakhri, Al-Muqaddasi, and Ibn Hawqal) 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 F?rsi (?????; "Persian"), 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 darb?r (?????), 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-Muqaffa? (cited by Ibn al-Nadim in Al-Fehrest). According to him, "P?rs? was the language spoken by priests, scholars, and the like; it is the language of Fars." It is obvious that this language refers to the Middle Persian. As for Dari, he says, "it is the language of the cities of Mad?'en; it is spoken by those who are at the king's court. [Its name] 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.
Note: according to the CIA Fact Book, the percentage of Persian/Dari speakers in Afghanistan is 80%. 1a The CIA Fact Book writes: Afghan Persian or Dari (official) 80% (Dari functions as the lingua franca), Pashto (official) 47%,....
Maps Dari language
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 (Modern) 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 (that is, to 300 BC), 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 (1700).
Dari or Deri has two meanings:
- language of the court
- "the Zebani Deri(Zeban i Deri or Zaban i Dari = the language of Deri), or the language of the court, and the Zebani Farsi, the dialect of Persia at large (...)"
- Dari, sometimes Araki-Methods (Iraqi), is a form of poetry used from Rudaki to Jami. In 1500 AD it appeared in Herat in the Persian-speaking Timurid dynasty, and the Persian poems of the Indian poets of the Mughal Empire who used the Indian verse methods or rhyme methods like Bedil and Muhammad Iqbal, became familiar with the Araki methods. Iqbal loved both styles of literature and poetry, when he wrote:
???? ???? ?? ????? ??? ???? 1
garcheh Hindi dar uz?bat2 shakkar ast
??? ????? ??? ????? ?? ????
tarz e goftar e Dari shirin tar ast
Translation according to literature and poetry: Even though in euphonious Hindi* is sugar - Rhyme method in Dari (Persian) is sweeter *
Qandi Parsi or [Ghand e Parsi] (Rock candy of Parsi) is a metaphor for the Persian language and poetry.
- Original bey Iqbal: Hindi; Hindi in Devanagariscript = Urdu in Persian-Arabic-script
- ???? is an adjective of uz?bat or ozubat ?????? English: bliss or delight, flavor or sweetness; in language, literature and poetry uzubat means euphonious, melody or phonaesthetics.
This poem is a poetic statement of the poet Iqbal with respect to the poetry of the 14th century Persian poet Hafez:
?????? ???? ??? ?????? ????
Shakkar shekan shavand hameh totiy?neh Hend
??? ??? ????? ?? ?? ?????? ???????
zeen qandeh P?rsi keh beh Beng?leh meravad
English translation:
All the parrots of India will crack sugar
Through this Persian Candy which is going to Bengal
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 (many of whom pursued imperialist policies in the regions where Persian was spoken).
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 ( = Poem ???) yi Dari or Dastan i Dari (tale of Dari), Tarz e Guftar e Dari (??? ????? ??? style of Dari convers) have spoken. Nazm (verse form) and Nassir (??? = novel, short story etc.) and ????? drama) - the three genres of literature. New Persian literature begins with Poems of Rudaki.
Counted according to sources from these Internet sites
Geographical distribution
Dari, which is sometimes called Farsi (Persian), is one of the two official languages of Afghanistan (the other being Pashto). 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 more than a half of the population of Afghanistan as a first language. Tajiks, who comprise approximately 27% of the population, are the primary speakers, followed by Hazaras (9%) and Aym?qs (4%). Moreover, many Pashtuns living in Tajik and Hazara concentrated areas also use Dari as a first language. The World Factbook states that 50% 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 Persocentric 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 the Iranian Persian they are pronounced do-piy?zeh and pey-j?meh. Persian lexemes and certain morphological elements (e.g., the ez?fe) 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.
Phonology
The principal differences between standard Iranian Persian, based on the dialect of the capital Tehran, and Afghan Dari, as based on the Kabul dialect, are:
- The merging of majhul vowels /e:, i:/ and /o:, u:/ into /i:/ and /u:/ respectively in Iranian Persian, whereas in Afghan Persian, they are still kept separate. For instance, the identically written words ??? 'lion' and 'milk' are pronounced the same in Iranian Persian as /?i:r/, but /?e:r/ for 'lion' and /?i:r/ for 'milk' in Afghan Persian. The long vowel in ??? "quick" and ??? "strong" is realized as /u:/ in Iranian Persian, in contrast, these words are pronounced /zu:d/ and /zo:r/ respectively by Persian speakers in Afghanistan.
- The treatment of the diphthongs of early Classical Persian "aw" (as "ow" in Engl. "cow") and "ay" (as "i" in English "ice"), which are pronounced [ow] (as in Engl. "low") and [ej] (as in English "day") in Iranian Persian. Dari, on the other hand, is more archaic, e.g. ????? 'Persian New Year' is realized as /nowru:z/ in Iranian and /nawro:z/ in Afghan Persian, and ???? 'no' is /na?ejr/ in Iranian and /na?ajr/ in Afghan Persian. Moreover, [ow] is simplified to [o] in normal Iranian speech, thereby merging with the short vowel /u/ (see below). This does not occur in Afghan Persian.
- The high short vowels /i/ and /u/ tend to be lowered in Iranian Persian to [e] and [o].
- The pronunciation of the labial consonant (?), which is realized as a voiced labiodental fricative [v], but Afghan Persian still retains the (classical) bilabial pronunciation [w]; [v] is found in Afghan Persian as an allophone of /f/ before voiced consonants.
- The convergence of voiced uvular stop [?] (?) and voiced velar fricative [?] (?) in Iranian Persian (presumably under the influence of Turkic languages like Azeri and Turkmen), is still kept separate in Dari.
- The realization of short final "a" (?-) as [e] in Iranian Persian.
- The realization of short non-final "a" as [æ] in Iranian Persian.
- [a] and [e] in word-final positions are separate in Dari, [e] is a word-final allophone of /æ/ 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.
Political views on the language
Successive governments of Afghanistan have promoted New Persian as an official language of government since the time of the Delhi Sultanate (1206-1526), even as those governments were dominated by Pashtun people. Sher Ali Khan of the Barakzai dynasty (1826-1973) 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. Within their respective linguistic boundaries, Dari and Pashto are the media of education.
See also
- Middle Persian
- Persian language
- Samanids
- Tajik language
- Hazaragi dialect
References
Further reading
- Lazard, G. "Dar? - The New Persian Literary Language" in Encyclopædia Iranica Online Edition.
- Phillott, Douglas Craven (1919). Higher Persian grammar for the use of the Calcutta University, showing differences between Afgan and modern Persian; with notes on rhetoric. Calcutta: Baptist Mission Press.
- Sakaria, S. (1967) Concise English - Afghan Dari Dictionary, Ferozsons, Kabul, OCLC 600815
- Farhadi, A. G. R.('Abd-ul-Ghafur Farhadi)(Abd-ul-ghafûr Farhâdi) (1955) Le Persan Parlé en Afghanistan: Grammaire du Kâboli Accompagné d'un Recueil de Quatrains Populaires de la Région de Kâbol, Centre national de la recherche scientifique or Librairie C. Klincksieck, Paris.
- Farhadi, Rawan A. G. (1975) The Spoken Dari of Afghanistan: A Grammar of Kaboli Dari (Persian) Compared to the Literary Language, Peace Corps, Kabul, OCLC 24699677
- Zellem, Edward. 2015. "Zarbul Masalha: 151 Afghan Dari Proverbs, 3rd edition". Charleston: CreateSpace.
- Zellem, Edward. 2012. "Afghan Proverbs Illustrated". Charleston: CreateSpace.
- (Unknown Title). 1979.
External links
- Dari at Encyclopædia Britannica
- Dari at Encyclopædia Iranica
- Dari language, alphabet and pronunciation
- Dari language resources
- Dari alphabet
- Learn Dari
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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