Persians

For the breed of cat, see Persian cat. For present day Iranian ethnic groups, see Iranian peoples § Demographics. For other uses, see Persian (disambiguation).
Persians
پارسی‌ها/فارسی/ایرانی
Total population
c. 60+ million[1]
Regions with significant populations
 Iran51–65%[2][3][4] (also including Gilaks and Mazanderanis)[2] of the total population
Languages
Persian, other Iranian languages
Religion
Majority:
Shia Islam
Minority:
Zoroastrianism, Christianity, Judaism, Baháʼí Faith, Sunni Islam, and various others[5]
Related ethnic groups
Other Iranian peoples
This article contains Persian text. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols.

The Persians (/ˈpɜːrʒənz/ PUR-zhənz or /ˈpɜːrʃənz/ PUR-shənz) are an Iranian ethnic group who comprise the majority of the population of Iran.[4] They share a common cultural system and are native speakers of the Persian language[6][7][8] as well as of the languages that are closely related to Persian.[9]

The ancient Persians were originally an ancient Iranian people who had migrated to the region of Persis (corresponding to the modern-day Iranian province of Fars) by the 9th century BCE.[10][11] Together with their compatriot allies, they established and ruled some of the world's most powerful empires[12][11] that are well-recognized for their massive cultural, political, and social influence, which covered much of the territory and population of the ancient world.[13][14][15] Throughout history, the Persian people have contributed greatly to art and science.[16][17][18] Persian literature is one of the world's most prominent literary traditions.[19]

In contemporary terminology, people from Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan who natively speak the Persian language are known as Tajiks, with the former two countries having their own dialects of Persian known as Dari and Tajiki, respectively; whereas those in the Caucasus (primarily in the present-day Republic of Azerbaijan and Dagestan, Russia), albeit heavily assimilated, are known as Tats.[20][21] Historically, however, the terms Tajik and Tat were used synonymously and interchangeably with Persian.[20] Many influential Persian figures hailed from outside of Iran's present-day borders—to the northeast in Afghanistan and Central Asia, and to a lesser extent within the Caucasus proper to the northwest.[22][23] In historical contexts, especially in English, "Persian" may be defined more loosely (often as a national identity) to cover all subjects of the ancient Persian polities, regardless of their ethnic background.

  1. ^ "Persian, Iranian". Ethnologue. Retrieved 11 December 2018. Total Iranian Persian users in all countries.
  2. ^ a b Elling, Rasmus Christian (18 February 2013). Minorities in Iran: Nationalism and Ethnicity after Khomeini. Springer. p. 19. ISBN 978-1-137-04780-9. The Factbook puts 'Persian and Persian dialects' at 58 percent, but 51 percent of the population as ethnic Persians, while the Library of Congress states that Persian 'is spoken as a mother tongue by at least 65 percent of the population and as a second language by a large proportion of the remaining 35 percent. The 'Persian' mentioned in the latter report must thus also include Gilaki and Mazi. However, Gilaki and Mazi are actually from a different branch of the Iranian language subfamily than Persian, and could be as such be seen not as dialects, but as distinct languages. Suffice it here to say that while some scholars see categories such as Gilakis and Mazandaranis as referring to separate ethnic groups due to their linguistic traits, others count them as 'Persians' on exactly the same basis.
  3. ^ Crane, Keith; Lal, Rollie; Martini, Jeffrey (6 June 2008). Iran's Political, Demographic, and Economic Vulnerabilities. RAND Corporation. p. 38. ISBN 9780833045270. Retrieved 17 January 2023.
  4. ^ a b "Country Profile: Iran" (PDF). Library of Congress – Federal Research Division. May 2008. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2015-10-07. Retrieved 30 April 2019.
  5. ^ "Goman Poll".
  6. ^ Beck, Lois (2014). Nomads in Postrevolutionary Iran: The Qashqa'i in an Era of Change. Routledge. p. xxii. ISBN 978-1317743866. (...) an ethnic Persian; adheres to cultural systems connected with other ethnic Persians (...)
  7. ^ Samadi, Habibeh; Perkins, Nick (2012). Ball, Martin; Crystal, David; Fletcher, Paul (eds.). Assessing Grammar: The Languages of Lars. Multilingual Matters. p. 169. ISBN 978-1-84769-637-3.
  8. ^ Fyre, R. N. (29 March 2012). "IRAN v. PEOPLES OF IRAN". Encyclopædia Iranica. The largest group of people in present-day Iran are Persians (*q.v.) who speak dialects of the language called Fārsi in Persian, since it was primarily the tongue of the people of Fārs."
  9. ^ Anonby, Erik J. (20 December 2012). "LORI LANGUAGE ii. Sociolinguistic Status of Lori". Encyclopædia Iranica. Conversely, the Nehāvand sub-province of Hamadān is home to ethnic Persians who speak NLori as a mother tongue. (...) The same is true of areas to the southwest, south, and east of the Lori language area (...): while the varieties spoken there show more structural similarity to Lori than to Persian, speakers identify themselves as ethnically Persian.
  10. ^ Xavier de Planhol (24 January 2012). "FĀRS i. Geography". Encyclopædia Iranica. Vol. IX. pp. ?–336. The name of Fārs is undoubtedly attested in Assyrian sources since the third millennium B.C.E. under the form Parahše. Originally, it was the "land of horses" of the Sumerians (Herzfeld, pp. 181–82, 184–86). The name was adopted by Iranian tribes which established themselves there in the 9th century B.C.E. in the west and southwest of Urmia lake. The Parsua (Pārsa) are mentioned there for the first time in 843 B.C.E., during the reign of Salmanassar III, and then, after they migrated to the southeast (Boehmer, pp. 193–97), the name was transferred, between 690 and 640, to a region previously called Anšan (q.v.) in Elamite sources (Herzfeld, pp. 169–71, 178–79, 186). From that moment the name acquired the connotation of an ethnic region, the land of the Persians, and the Persians soon thereafter founded the vast Achaemenid empire. A never-ending confusion thus set in between a narrow, limited, geographical usage of the term—Persia in the sense of the land where the aforesaid Persian tribes had shaped the core of their power—and a broader, more general usage of the term to designate the much larger area affected by the political and cultural radiance of the Achaemenids. The confusion between the two senses of the word was continuous, fueled by the Greeks who used the name Persai to designate the entire empire.
  11. ^ a b Cite error: The named reference book2 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  12. ^ Schmitt, R. "ACHAEMENID DYNASTY". Encyclopædia Iranica. Vol. I. pp. 414–426. In 550 B.C. Cyrus (called "the Great" by the Greeks) overthrew the Median empire under Astyages and brought the Persians into domination over the Iranian peoples; he achieved combined rule over all Iran as the first real monarch of the Achaemenid dynasty. Within a few years he founded a multinational empire without precedent—a first world-empire of historical importance, since it embraced all previous civilized states of the ancient Near East. (...) The Persian empire was a multinational state under the leadership of the Persians; among these peoples the Medes, Iranian sister nation of the Persians, held a special position.
  13. ^ Farr, Edward (1850). History of the Persians. Robert Carter. pp. 124–7.
  14. ^ Roisman & Worthington 2011, p. 345.
  15. ^ Durant, Will (1950). Age of Faith. Simon and Schuster. p. 150. Repaying its debt, Sasanian art exported its forms and motives eastward into India, Turkestan, and China, westward into Syria, Asia Minor, Constantinople, the Balkans, Egypt, and Spain.
  16. ^ Cite error: The named reference burke was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  17. ^ Cite error: The named reference Persian presence was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  18. ^ Cite error: The named reference Bertold Spuler was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  19. ^ Cite error: The named reference Persian literature was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  20. ^ a b "TAJIK i. THE ETHNONYM: ORIGINS AND APPLICATION". Encyclopædia Iranica. 20 July 2009. By mid-Safavid times the usage tājik for 'Persian(s) of Iran' may be considered a literary affectation, an expression of the traditional rivalry between Men of the Sword and Men of the Pen. Pietro della Valle, writing from Isfahan in 1617, cites only Pārsi and ʿAjami as autonyms for the indigenous Persians, and Tāt and raʿiat 'peasant(ry), subject(s)' as pejorative heteronyms used by the Qezelbāš (Qizilbāš) Torkmān elite. Perhaps by about 1400, reference to actual Tajiks was directed mostly at Persian-speakers in Afghanistan and Central Asia; (...)
  21. ^ Ostler, Nicholas (2010). The Last Lingua Franca: English Until the Return of Babel. Penguin UK. pp. 1–352. ISBN 978-0141922218. Tat was known to have been used at different times to designate Crimean Goths, Greeks and sedentary peoples generally, but its primary reference came to be the Persians within the Turkic domains. (...) Tat is nowadays specialized to refer to special groups with Iranian languages in the west of the Caspian Sea.
  22. ^ Nava'i, Ali Shir (tr. & ed. Robert Devereaux) (1996). Muhakamat al-lughatain. Leiden: Brill. p. 6.
  23. ^ Starr, S. F. (2013). Lost Enlightenment: Central Asia's Golden Age from the Arab Conquest to Tamerlane. Princeton University Press.