Amin N. answered 07/18/24
Amin, instructor in Persian language
Persian (Farsi), the language of modern-day Iran, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan, is from the Indo-European family of languages, which means it has common roots with Greek, Latin, the Germanic and Slavic languages, and Sanskrit. Arabic is from the Semitic or Afro-Asiatic family, which includes Hebrew, Amharic, etc. The Arab conquest of Persia in the 7th century brought not only the religion of Islam but the Arabic language to the Iranian plateau, which is why Persian today is written in the Arabic script. Persian has adopted a vast body of vocabulary from Arabic, though the connotations in Persian often differ from those in Arabic. Owing to the differences in language families, the grammars of the two languages are quite different. Educated Iranians can read and understand some measure of fusha or Modern Standard Arabic without being able to converse in the language. The province of Khuzestan in Iran, which borders Iraq, has a significant population of ethnic Arabs.