Iranian Languages: Evolution and Diversity of the Iranian Language Family

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Persian may be the official language in Iran, but it’s not the only language spoken there. People living in and around Iran speak dozens of Iranian languages, including dialects of Persian and Pashto. But what classifies as an Iranian language—and how many people speak one?

This guide explores the Iranian language family, its evolution, and which languages fall under the Eastern and Western Iranian language categories.

What is an Iranian language?

Iranian languages sometimes refer to languages spoken in the country of Iran, but linguistically, they’re a category of languages from the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European language family. The Indo-Iranian language family includes two parts: Iranian languages and Indo-Aryan languages, such as Hindi and Bengali.

Both Iranian languages and Indo-Aryan languages descend from a similar Proto-Indo-Iranian ancestor language in Central Asia. The two groups diverged around 2000 B.C.E. and developed into their own language categories.

Historians and linguists typically divide the Iranian language timeline into the following three categories:

• Old Iranian (2000 B.C.E. to 600 B.C.E.): includes Old Persian and Old Avestan, the language of ancient Zoroastrian texts
• Middle Iranian (400 B.C.E to 900 C.E.): includes Middle Persian and the extinct language groups of Parthian and Bactrian
• Modern Iranian (900 C.E. to present): includes modern Persian, Pashto, and Kurdish languages

>>Learn about the six largest language families.

Modern Iranian language list

Today, around 200 million people speak an Iranian language in Iran and its surrounding countries, including Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Pakistan, and Iraq. Most of the 86 existing Iranian languages are regional dialects of larger macrolanguages and language groups, which linguists divide into Eastern and Western Iranian languages. 

*Population data from worlddata.info, ethnologue.com, and britannica.com

Is Arabic an Iranian language?

Even though nearly 2 million people speak Arabic in Iran, Arabic is not considered a linguistically Iranian language. It belongs to the Semitic branch Afro-Asiatic language family, while Persian, Pashto, and the other Iranian languages belong to the Iranian branch of the Indo-European family. 

Arabic has had a strong influence on Iranian languages, many of which include Arabic loanwords and use the Arabic alphabet. However, Iranian language speakers and Arabic speakers would need additional study in order to fully understand each other.

Western Iranian languages

Over 75% of Iranian speakers speak a Western Iranian language. Despite their label as Western Iranian languages, these languages and their dialects span a vast area of the Middle East between western Armenia and central Pakistan.

Persian

Persian is a Southwestern Iranian language spoken by around 120 million people around the world. Known as Farsi in Iran, the Persian macrolanguage includes the Luri and Dari dialects spoken in Afghanistan. Tajik, a Persian dialect spoken in nearby Tajikistan, is sometimes considered to be a closely related language to Persian rather than a dialect. Persian uses the Perso-Arabic script, an adaptation of right-to-left Arabic script with some added letters.

Kurdish

Kurdish is a Northwestern Iranian language spoken by around 30 million people today, mainly in the Kurdistan region that spans Turkey, Iraq, Syria, Iran, and Armenia. It falls into the Kurdic language group and uses two different writing systems: the literary form of Sorani, which uses a modified Arabic alphabet, and the Latin-based Hawar writing system.

Caspian

The Northwestern Caspian languages describe dialects spoken along the Caspian Sea, primarily in Iran and southeast Azerbaijan. Today, over 10 million people speak a Caspian language, including Mazandarani, Gilaki, Semnani, and Tati, and most also speak Persian.

Balochi

Around 9 million Baloch people speak a dialect of the Northwestern Balochi language in Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. Balochi was heavily influenced by nearby Iranian languages, including Persian, Kurdish, and Pashto. Balochi was solely an oral language until the 19th century, when scholars created the Balochi alphabet written in the Perso-Arabic script. 

Zaza-Gorani

The non-Kurdish Kurdic languages are often grouped into the Zaza-Gorani category, a Northwestern Iranian language group. Common Zaza-Gorani dialects include Zaza, Gorani, and Shabaki, and are spoken by around 4 million people in Turkey, Iraq, and Iran. 

Eastern Iranian languages

Though the Eastern Iranian languages have fewer speakers than Western Iranian languages, they include many different dialects across the Middle East and Central Asia. Most Eastern Iranian language speakers live in Afghanistan and Pakistan, though many languages span all the way into Russia and China.

Pashto

An official language in Afghanistan (along with Dari, a Persian dialect), Pashto is part of the Southeastern Iranian language group. Its 50 million speakers live primarily in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Pashto, also called Pakhtu, is similar to Balochi and Sindhi, with loanwords from Uzbek, Persian, and Arabic. Like Persian, Pashto uses Perso-Arabic script and is written from right to left. 

Ossetian

Iron and Digor are the main dialects of the Ossetian language, which is spoken by about half a million people in Russia (North Ossetia), and Georgia (South Ossetia). Also called the Ossetic language, Ossetian is written in the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets, similar to nearby South Slavic languages like Bulgarian and Slovenian.

Pamiri

Most of the 150,000 Pamiri speakers live in Tajikistan, primarily in the Badakhshan province. Part of the Southeastern Iranian language group, the Pamiri languages (also called the Pamir languages) are generally only oral languages. Dialects like Shugni developed writing systems in the 20th century, but political pressure from the Soviet Union prevented further Pamiri publications.

Yaghnobi

Also located mainly in Tajikistan are the Yaghnobi people, who speak the Northeastern Iranian language of Yaghnobi. This language is considered vulnerable by the Endangered Languages Project, as only 12,000 people speak Yaghnobi today and it does not have a current written form. Additionally, more Yaghnobi people, especially young people, speak Tajik as a first language rather than Yaghnobi.

Indo-Aryan languages

Connected to Iranian languages on the Indo-Iranian branch are the Indo-Aryan languages. With nearly a billion speakers in Central and South Asia, including India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka, the Indo-Aryan languages make up some of the most commonly spoken languages in the world.

Indo-Aryan languages include: 

• Hindi (600 million speakers)
• Bengali (278 million speakers)
• Urdu (237 million speakers)
• Punjabi (150 million speakers)
• Marathi (99 million speakers)

Other Indo-Aryan languages—including Gujarati, Asamiya, Kashmiri, Konkani, Nepali, Odia, and Sindhi—are also spoken in Central and South Asia.

How are Indo-Iranian languages similar?

Due to their geographically and cultural proximity, Iranian and Indo-Aryan languages have influenced each other for thousands of years. And even though Arabic isn’t an Indo-Iranian language, its vocabulary and writing system has had a large influence on each of these languages as well.

These everyday words in four common Indo-Iranian languages demonstrate how they’re connected through history and linguistics.

Are Iranian languages easy to learn?

Most Iranian languages are considered Category III languages in terms of language difficulty rankings, meaning they would take around 44 weeks (or 1,100 hours) of practice to become proficient. 

For English learners, Germanic languages like German, Dutch, and Norwegian are often easier to learn because they share a grammatical structure with English. Romance languages like Spanish, French, and Italian are also more straightforward to learn because English contains many loanwords from Spanish, French, and Italian. 

If you already speak Arabic—a category IV language—you may be able to pick up a language with strong Arabic influences, including Farsi. Start learning Farsi today with Rosetta Stone’s Dynamic Immersion method, and learn how to speak like a local.