Persian as a bridge language

by Glossika Content Team

Interested in learning the languages of Western, Central, or Southern Asia?

In that case, you should look into Persian!

In addition to being a beautiful, poetic language in and of itself, with a lifetime of things to explore, learning Persian to an intermediate level will also put you in an advantaegous position from which to learn the region's other languages.

What is it, though, that makes Persian such a good "bridge" language?

Persian is a Simple Indo-European Language

Languages are categorised in families based on their shared roots, and more than 45% of the earth’s population speaks one of the languages from the Indo-European family! Examples include Hindi, Spanish, German, French, Swedish and so many other languages. If you are reading this, you are already proficient enough in one of them: English.

Persian is another member of this Indo-European family.

If we think of these languages as being an actual family, we might say that Persian is like a brother to Hindi, a cousin to Classic Latin or Greek, and an uncle for English.

While Persian might seem like a distant and elusive language form afar, once you get into it, you'll immediately see resemblances in terms of grammar and vocabulary. Within your first days of encountering Persian, for example, you'll notice things like:

  • Daughter sounds remarkably like Persian "dkhtr" (دختر)
  • Spanish “está” and Persian “ast” (است) have the same root
  • If you speak Hindi or Punjabi, the Subject-Object-Verb sentence structure will feel familiar

Compared to languages like Arabic, Turkish, or many other languages of the region, these shared roots and similarities make Persian a surprisingly acessible language for people who already know another Indo-European language.

Photo by Rémi Walle / Unsplash

And it gets better.

Consider these challenges you face with other languages:

And now lets look at Persian. It's:

  • Completely genderless (and I mean COMPLETELY — it doesn't even have separate pronouns for he/she)
  • Its abstraction system is quite simple
  • All verb conjugations, regardless of tense, follow one single set of rules
  • There are one or two noun cases (it's debateable), but you don't need to change the form of the noun — you just add the relevant case marker

All in all, Persian is remarkably consistent. The chances are good that it's actually grammatically simpler than your mother tongue.

Simply put, Persian is a bridge to Central, Western, and Southern Asia because the language is incredibly accessible. It'll feel straightforward to learn, even if you don't know anything about language learning.

(Editor's note: The author has created a wonderful YouTube series on Rumi's poetry. You'll enjoy it if you already know some Persian... and if you don't, it'll give you one more reason to start learning.)

Persian has a long history as a Lingua Franca

A "Lingua Franca" is a language which the people of a region have agreed upon as being the language of culture, prestige and politics. Many people will speak their native language at home, then use a Lingua Franca for communication when away from home.

English is the Lingua Franca of the 21st century, so this article was written in English, but that's a quite recent phenomenon. Latin was the Western world's Lingua Franca until just a couple hundred years ago.

By contrast, Central, Southern and Western Asia made Persian the language of education and communication as far back as the 9th century, spanning a vast region that stretched from Eastern India and Western China (the Tibet area) up to the steeps of today’s Kazakhstan and spread to the west to Mediterranean Sea.

Some examples of Persian's historical influence:

  • You might have noticed that the names of many countries in this region end in “-stan”. If so, you've encountered Persian before! "-stan" is a Persian suffix denoting "the land of ___" (Tajikistan = The Land of the Tajik People).
  • The official language of Mughal India was Persian, until the British colonisation, and the language of the court of Ottoman Empire was Persian, until only a couple of decades before their demise.
  • The official language of Pakistan (Urdu) has up to 40% of its vocabulary taken from Persian roots, and their national anthem is almost completely written in Persian.

Thus, for learning any of these languages, having some background knowledge of Persian is an incredible asset.

Photo by Aslı Yılmaz / Unsplash

Points where history and Persia crossed

While I mentioned the influence of Persian on other languages as being an asset for learning them, I should also acknowledge how other languages influenced Persian and how this can also be helping language learners. Although this time the relationship is reversed, it is still arguable that Persian is a better “bridge” language because it has gathered all those impacts into one language, thus giving learners a glimpse of all of them at once.

Persian and the Semitic languages

Persian has been influenced by Semitic languages (a branch of the Afro-Asiatic family) since the beginning of its written history; Iranic people (including but not limited to Persians) had close relationships with the Semitic people of the Southern and Western Levant. Many Arabic and Hebrew words (although hard to recognise due to transformations over time) are from Old Persian origins, and, in turn, Modern Persian also has up to 30 to 40 percent Arabic Loanwords. There were many cultural exchanges between Persians and Israelites which resulted in some Hebrew words coming to Persian, too.

The Perso-Arabic alphabet

The influences are not limited only to words, but ideas, proverbs, structures, and, perhaps most importantly, writing systems. Middle Persian used to be written with a version of the Aramaic script (another Semitic language) that was modified to work with the specific sounds and structures of Persian. After the conquest of the second Persian Empire by the Muslim Khalifate, the Arabic script was introduced, and the Modern Persian was formed; it was in this era when what today is known as the Perso-Arabic script was developed from more primitive versions of the Arabic script, which not only was more useful for the Arabic language itself, but, again, could represent sounds in Persian which were absent in Arabic.

Persian and the Altaic languages

Through both Islamic Empire, as well as the role of Persian as the Lingua Franca, this script became the main script of many other languages of the region including Pashto, Urdu, Turkish (before mid 20th century), Azeri, etc., each time alongside some necessary modifications for the given language. Persian's relationship with Turkish, however, was not limited to the script. The land known as Persia was ruled by dynasties of Turkic descent, and although Persian was the language of the court, these dynasties also left their own footprints on the language. There are many cultural perspectives as well as several words that infiltrated Persian from Turkic roots (e.g., You have heard about Genghis Khan; both “Khan” and its feminine pair “Khanum” are common words in Persian).

Thus, Persian is also a glimpse into Altaic languages, another family which includes Turkish, Mongolian, Azeri, etc.

Iran's Khaju Bridge | Photo by mohammad nasr / Unsplash

Some Persian that you already know

As I mentioned, if you speak any Indo-Eurpean language, or any of the languages of the region, you'll already have encountered many things that are either direct influences of Persian or are coming from shared roots.

Here's a few examples for you:

  • When you say “Brother” in English or “Dos” in Spanish, you are in the realm of shared roots (“Barādar” and “Do” in Persian, respectively).
  • When you say “Khubsurat” (Beautiful) in Urdu or “Namuzhaj” (Exemplar) in Arabic, you are leveraging Persian's influences on the languages of the region (“Khub”, “Surat”, “Namunag”, respectively meaning “Good”, “Appearance”, “Example” in Persian).

And there are even several English words that have been borrowed directly from Persian:

  • Paradise — the name of the royal garden of the first Persian Empire, the celestial beauty of which was conveyed to Europe through the writings of Greek historians, and the word eventually became a synonym for "heaven"
  • Jackal — comes from Persian's “Shagāl”
  • Kiosk — comes from Persian's “Kushk”

In summary

Persian is a very simple language to learn compared to most languages of the region, and its shared roots with Indo-European languages (of which English is one!) will make it even easier to learn for speakers of these these languages.

At the same time, Persian is perhaps the language that most influenced other languages of the geographical region, so knowing it is kind of like knowing a little of all of those other languages. Furthermore, this impact was not unilateral: Persian shows traces of many languages, even some European languages, in places such as its writing system and many of its cultural/linguistic aspects.

This simplicity, and these shared connections, make Persian a perfect “bridge” language. It presents learners with its own own beautiful world to discover, but also opens the door for learning any of the other languages of Central/Southern/Western Asia.

To contact Sohrab or learn more about him, visit his website and Instagram

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