Hello everyone,

My name is Fatemeh, an Iranian-American living in VA, currently working as a Farsi instructor for Transparent Language. I will be posting language and culture related content on this Persian blog. I hope you enjoy them and learn about Persian-Farsi language and its culture and traditions.

First things first, let me answer a common question about my language. Is it Farsi, or Persian, or Persian-Farsi? Well, to be honest, being born and raised in Iran, we always called our language Farsi, until I came to the US, when I was asked whether I speak Farsi or Persian! At school we learned فارسی or Farsi. It is good to know that پارسی or Parsi is the same as Farsi, with one letter difference. That’s because in Arabic there is no letter “P”, so Arabs (after their invasion of Persia) changed Parsi to Farsi. This rule was applied to many other words that had letters “p”, “g”, “ch”, and “zh”.

Also, Farsi, or Parsi, is spoken in different countries like Iran, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, some minorities in Iraq, and parts of India and Pakistan. Therefore, languages like Urdu, Pashtu, and Dari have similarities with Farsi in their vocabulary and syntax. As a result, when one hears Persian-Farsi it is geared toward Farsi spoken in Iran. On the other hand, Farsi-Dari is the Farsi spoken in Afghanistan, and Tajik-Farsi or Tajiki is the Farsi spoken in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan and written with Cyrillic language “Фаршер” (Farsi)!

I have been working in the field of linguistics for many years now. I am also pursuing my PhD in Social Linguistics Anthropology and am obsessed with how languages affect the culture of a community. In this blog, I am going to focus all my endeavors to help Persian-Farsi language learners in different regions to learn more about this sweet and poetic language and apply their learning to practice. In my next post, I will write more about why Farsi is said to be sweet and poetic.

Until next time and the next post!

(Shad bashed!) شاد باشید

Enjoy your day! (Be happy!)