There are many loanwords in the Persian language, mostly coming from Arabic, English, French, and the Turkic languages. It has been suggested that Persian language#Arabic Alphabet be merged into this article or section. ... The coat of arms of the Tajik Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic circa 1929. ... A loanword is a word directly taken into one language from another with little or no translation. ... The Arabic language (Arabic: ‎ transliterated: ), or simply Arabic (Arabic: ‎ transliterated: ), is the largest member of the Semitic branch of the Afro-Asiatic language family (classification: South Central Semitic) and is closely related to Hebrew and Aramaic. ... The English language is a West Germanic language that originates in England. ... The Turkic languages constitute a language family of some thirty languages, spoken across a vast area from Eastern Europe to Siberia and Western China with an estimated 140 million native speakers and tens of millions of second-language speakers. ...

Persian has likewise influenced the vocabularies of other languages, especially Indo-Iranian languages and Turkic languages. Many Persian words have also found their way into the English language. The Indo-Iranian languages are the language links between India and Iran. ... The Turkic languages constitute a language family of some thirty languages, spoken across a vast area from Eastern Europe to Siberia and Western China with an estimated 140 million native speakers and tens of millions of second-language speakers. ...

Arabic influence

The Islamic conquest of Iran lasted for two centuries, from the 7th to the 9th CE. Arabic gradually was replaced with Pahlavi and as the Pahlavi books translated into Arabic by newly-converted Iranians, Arabic became the language of the intellectuals: Writers, poets and philosophers, as well as people in the administration chose to speak and write in Arabic. Combatants Sassanid Persia Rashidun Caliphate The Islamic conquest of Persia (637-651 CE) led to the end of the Sassanid Empire and the eventual decline of the Zoroastrian religion in Persia (modern day Iran). ... The Arabic language (Arabic: ‎ transliterated: ), or simply Arabic (Arabic: ‎ transliterated: ), is the largest member of the Semitic branch of the Afro-Asiatic language family (classification: South Central Semitic) and is closely related to Hebrew and Aramaic. ... The Pahlavi script was used broadly in the Sasanid Persian Empire to write down Middle Persian for secular, as well as religious purposes. ...

During this period, many Arabic words were imported into the Persian language and many Persian words found their way into Arabic. Since the mid-80s, there has been an Arabic resurgence by the Islamic Regime in Iran, and detestation of anything Iranian by the authorities. Most of the prominent members of the Islamic regime and clerics in Iran are of non-Iranian descent, which has caused a considerable number of new Arabic entering Persian. The new-loanwords have also been added to the lexicon of the language. For a computational analysis of Persian, all these "new" Arabic loans have to be included in the dictionary. Look up lexicon in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ...

Arabic has had an extensive influence on the Persian lexicon, but it has not really affected the structure of the language. Although a considerable portion of the lexicon is derived from Arabic roots, including some of the Arabic plural patterns, the morphological process used to obtain these lexical elements has not been imported into Persian and it is not productive in the language.

These Arabic words have been imported and lexicalized in Persian. So, for instance, the Arabic plural form for ketâb is kotob obtained by the root derivation system. In Persian, the plural for the lexical word ketâb obtained by just adding the Persian plural morpheme (ketâb+hâ --> ketâbhâ). Any new Persian words, however, can only be pluralized by the addition of the plural morpheme since the Arabic root system is not a productive process in Persian. In morpheme-based morphology, a morpheme is the smallest lingual unit that carries a semantic interpretation. ...

In addition, since the plurals formed by the Arabic morphological system constitute only a small portion of the Persian vocabulary (about 5% in the Shiraz corpus), it is not necessary to include them in the morphology; they are instead listed in the dictionary as irregular forms. Morphology is the following: In linguistics, morphology is the study of the structure of word forms. ...

On the other hand, Among educated Persians, there have been sporadic efforts as far back as the tenth century to diminish the use of Arabic loanwords in their language. Both Pahlavi shahs supported such efforts in the twentieth century. Since the Revolution, a contrary tendency to increase the use of Arabic words in both spoken and written Persian has emerged among government leaders.

See also

• List of English words of Persian origin
• Persian Today Corpus