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Western Iranian languages

Branch of the Iranian languages

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History

From a diachronic perspective, the Iranian languages are stratified into three distinct historical stages: Old Iranian, Middle Iranian, and New Iranian. The diachronic classification of the Western Iranian languages also follows this tripartite developmental trajectory. Old Persian and Median constitute the earliest documented Western Iranian languages from the Old Iranian era. While a substantial corpus of Old Persian has been preserved, the textual evidence for Median is highly restricted, limited to a small number of lexical items attested in Old Persian inscriptions. The Persian language is the only Western Iranian language attested across all three stages of Iranian languages: Old, Middle, and New Iranian and is the only Iranian language for which close philological relationships between all of its three stages are established and so that Old, Middle, and New Persian represent one and the same language of Persian.

Old Iranian period

The Old Iranian period languages consisted of the following languages:

Old Persian appears primarily in the inscriptions, clay tablets and seals of the Achaemenid era (c. 600 BCE to 300 BCE). Examples of Old Persian have been found in what is now Iran, Armenia, Bahrain, Iraq, Turkey and Egypt, with the most important attestation by far being the contents of the Behistun Inscription (dated to 522 BCE). Median, on the other hand, is attested only by numerous loanwords in Old Persian. Nothing is known of its grammar, structurally, however, its phonological isoglosses align more closely with Avestan than with Old Persian. It is believed that during the brief period of Median rule, Median functioned, at least to some degree, as an official language within western Iran.

Middle Iranian period

The Middle Iranian period languages consisted of the following languages:

Parthian was the official language of the Parthian state and the local language east of the Caspian Sea. The language was written in a distinct script derived from the Imperial Aramaic chancellery script of the Achaemenids, and later developed into the Pahlavi writing system. A direct successor to Old Persian, Middle Persian was the dominant language in the Sasanian Empire.

Modern period (Neo-Iranian)

There is no consensus on the exact linguistic classification of the Iranian languages, and the traditional grouping between Northwestern and Southwestern Iranian languages seems to become more ambiguous upon closer inspection of individual dialects and languages. This indicates that these language groups are not genetic entities. Primarily focused on phonology, Ludwig Paul and Gernot Windfuhr propose that the Western Iranian languages exist on "a scale of ‘Northwesternness’ or ‘Southwesternness’, on which each language is ‘more or less’ NW or SW.", though this does not take into account linguistic convergence in grammar and other linguistic aspects.

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