The Persian Language is one of the richest and oldest languages in the world. As the old saying goes, to understand the people of a country, you have to learn their language.
Persian is a branch of Indo-Persian, from the core lingual family of Indo-European languages that have gone through three historical periods: ancient, medieval, and new. The Persian language divides into northern and southern branches based on geography, and each of these two has western and eastern sub-branches. Based on this evidence, we can know the relationship between the thousands of sub-languages and dialects of Iran.
Ancient Persian is the language spoken by the kings of the Achaemenid Empire and the people of that time.
At the same time, in the north of Iran, people talked in the Avestan language named after the holy book of Zoroastrianism. Gatha is the oldest part of Avesta in the Avestan language. The remnant of this is the language of the cities around Semnan or Lori language.
Middle Persian was the language of the Parthians and Sassanids. Many books written in the Pahlavi language are available, and like the Avestan language, we can hear its remnant in the Lari dialect.
Iran has always been a gate for different cultures to meet, and for this reason, it has always hosted many ethnic groups. Some migrated, like the Aryans, and some forced their way inside. An ironic fact is that we speak Persian because the Aryans held power over the Elamites. They spread the language all over the plateau of Iran. The same goes for Europe as well. That is why most people around the world speak one of the branches of the Indo-European language. We share more than we think, and we have more things in common than our differences.
The first to influence the Persian language were the Arabs. Many Arabic words, including the Arabic or Semitic, or Aramaic alphabets, entered the Persian language. The Turks, Turkmen, and Mongols, in turn, ruled Iran for a long time and added words to the Persian language.
Due to the rich literature of pre-Islamic Iran and writers such as Ya’qub ibn al-Layth al-Saffar, Samani rulers, Rudaki, Ferdowsi, Nezami, Rumi, Nizam al-Mulk, Abu’l-Fadl Bayhaqi, Rabia Balkhi, Saadi, and Hafez, even after the attacks of different ethnic groups, the Persian Language was still whole and remained united and passed on its legacy to the New Persian, the language spoken by the Iranian people today.
From all this diversity in different tribes and clans, different dialects and languages were born. Languages such as Lori, Kurdish, Lak, and Gilaki have Persian roots. The Iranian Turkish language, which is called Azeri, is the language of the Arabs living in Khuzestan Province, Iranian Christians, and Iranian Jews, despite their differences from the Persian language, do not separate them from the Iranian people and their nationality.
In other big cities that speak Persian, you can hear different accents. Shirazi people speak Persian with their specific intonation, and the same goes for the people of Isfahan, Yazd, Kerman, Southerners, Zahedan, and Mashhad.
This diversity in language has globalized Iranian literature and introduced famous poets, writers, and musicians to the world.