PERSIAN FAMILY NAMES Seyed Mostafa Assi History, the Land and Languages of Iran The contemporary Iranian names comprise part of the lexicon of Modern Persian language, which is the official and standard language of Iran. Present Iran occupies the central part of the historical and cultural Persia, spreading geographically from the Indian subcontinent in the east to Mesopotamia and Anatolia in the west and from the Caspian Sea and Caucasus Mountains in the north to the Persia Gulf in the south. There are several hypothetical reasons—among them the diversity and mildness of the climate—that attracted the Indo-Aryan tribes to migrate from northern Asian steppes around the Aral Lake and north of Caspian Sea to southern regions of Indian subcontinent and Iranian plateau. “The Indo-Aryans split off around 1800 BCE to 1600 BCE from the Iranians, whereafter the Indo-Aryans migrated into Anatolia and, possibly in multiple waves, the Punjab (northern Pakistan and India), while the Iranians moved into Iran, both bringing with them the Indo-Iranian languages. The Medes, Parthians and Persians begin to appear on the western Iranian Plateau from c. 800 BCE, after which they remained under Assyrian rule for several centuries, as it was with the rest of the peoples in the Near East. The Achaemenids replaced Median rule from 559 BCE. Around the first millennium of the Common Era (AD), the Kambojas, the Pashtuns and the Baloch began to settle on the eastern edge of the Iranian Plateau, on the mountainous frontier of northwestern and western Pakistan, displacing the earlier Indo-Aryans from the area.” the earlier Indo-Aryans from the area.” (retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-Aryan_migrations) Iranian languages Iranian languages are a subgroup of the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European language family. Iranian languages are spoken in Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and parts of Iraq, Turkey, Pakistan, and scattered areas of the Caucasus Mountains. Linguists typically approach the Iranian languages in historical terms because they fall readily into three distinct categories—Ancient, Middle, and Modern Iranian. Of the ancient Iranian languages, only two are known from texts or inscriptions, Avestan and Old Persian, the oldest parts of which date from the 6th century BCE. Avestan (an extinct East Iranian language and the language of the Zoroastrian holy book, Avesta) was probably spoken in northeastern Iran, and Old Persian (an extinct West Iranian language and the official language of the Achaemenian Empire) is known to have been used in southwestern Iran. In fact, it was the Old Persian, among the Old Iranian languages that continued to develop in the course of time to change into Middle Persian and Modern Persian. The Persian Language Three distinct stages are recognized in the development of the Persian language: 1. Old Persian: from six centuries BC to 331 BC (during the reign of Achaemenids) 2. Middle Persian: from 331 BC to 867 CA (Seleucid, Parthian, Sassanid and early Islamic era) 3. Modern Persian: from 867 CA to the Present time (from the establishment of the Independent Iranian dynasties to Modern times) These stages represent such great changes in the syntax, morphology, sound system and lexicon of the language that most linguists regard them as three languages. “Modern Persian grammar is in many ways much simpler than its ancestral forms, having lost most of the inflectional systems of the older varieties of Persian. Other than markers to indicate that nouns and pronouns are direct objects, Modern Persian has no system of case inflections. Possession is shown by addition of a special suffix (called the ezāfeh) to the possessed noun. Verbs retain a set of personal