The Arabic Language

17.4 Arabic in Iran
In the early centuries of Arab domination after the fall of the Sasanian Empire, 
Arabic became both the dominant and the prestigious language of the Persian 
provinces. This situation changed with political developments (see Chapter 5): 

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The Arabic Language
New Persian (Farsi) became the national language of the ʿAbbāsid successor 
states in eastern Iran and Central Asia, but Classical Arabic retained its position 
as the language of the 
Qurʾān
. At the present time, there is one province of Iran, 
Khuzestan, where Arabic is still spoken by an Arab minority (cf. above, Chapter 
11, pp. 203f.). Strangely enough, the Iranian authorities do not seem to find any 
contradiction between their treatment of the Arabic-speaking minority, who are 
not encouraged to cultivate their ethnic and linguistic background, on the one 
hand, and their reverence for Arabic as the language of the Holy Book, on the other.
From the beginning, contacts between Arabic and Persian were intensive. 
The amount of Persian loanwords in Arabic is considerable (cf. above, p. 70). 
Conversely, of all the languages with which Arabic came into contact, Persian 
is the one that was most influenced by this process. The number of Arabic 
loanwords is enormous, not only in the literary language, but even in everyday 
speech. From time to time there have been trends to de-Arabicise Persian vocabu-
lary, sometimes for political reasons. The Arabic component of the language is so 
deeply rooted, however, that it would be impossible to eradicate it completely. 
Compared with the language reform in Turkey, which aimed at the total eradi
-
cation of the Arabic vocabulary, language reform in Iran was more moderate. 
Inspired by the language reform in Turkey under Atatürk, Reza Shah established 
an Iranian language academy (
Farhangestān
) in 1928, with the explicit aim of 
modernising the language, including the replacement of Arabic loanwords by 
Persian equivalents. This language purism was opposed by those who felt that 
this move was also intended as a step towards secularisation. Subsequent efforts 
under Mohammed Reza Shah and even after the Islamic revolution of 1979 have 
been partly successful, in the sense that some Arabic words were indeed replaced 
by Persian equivalents.
Persian is written with the Arabic alphabet, with the addition of four letters (
p
, 
č
, 
ž
, 
g
). Since a number of Arabic phonemes merged in the process of borrowing, 
the script has become ambiguous: Arabic /ṯ/, /s/, /ṣ/ are pronounced as /s/; 
Arabic /t/ and /ṭ/ as /t/; Arabic /ḏ/, /z/, /ḍ/ and /ḏ̣/ as /z/; Arabic /ġ/ and /q/ 
as /ġ/; Arabic /ʿ/ and /ʾ/ as /ʾ/; and Arabic /ḥ/ and /h/ as /h/. All Arabic loans are 
written, however, according to Arabic orthography, which places an extra burden 
on Iranian children learning to write.
Most of the Arabic loans are abstract words, in particular, in the domains of 
religion, science, scholarship and literature. The full impact of Arabic can be seen 
especially in the morphology of these words: in many cases, Arabic words retain 
their original plural endings, for example:
moʾallem
/
moʾallemin
‘teacher’ (Arabic 
muʿallim
)
mosāfer
/
mosāferin
‘passenger, traveller’ (Arabic 
musāfir
)
ejtemāʾi/ejtemāʾiyin ‘socialist’ (Arabic ijtimāʿī)
daraje/darajāt ‘degree’ (Arabic daraja)

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Arabic as a World Language 
323
maġāle
/
maġālāt
‘article’ (Arabic 
maqāla
)
hejvān
/
hejvānāt
‘animal’ (Arabic 
ḥayawān
)
The plural ending 
-āt
was applied even to words that were not of Arabic origin, 
for example, 
deh
/
dehāt
‘village’ (the plural means ‘country’), 
mive
/
mivežāt
‘fruit’. 
Broken plurals were often taken over together with their singular, for example:
vaġt
/
ouġāt
‘time’ (Arabic 
waqt
)
hāl
/
ahvāl
‘situation’ (Arabic 
ḥāl
)
ġazā
/
aġziye
‘food’ (Arabic 
ġiḏāʾ
)
In Modern Persian, it is quite common, however, to abandon the broken plural 
and supply the word with a Persian plural ending, for example, 
ḫabar-hā
‘news’ 
alongside 
aḫbār
(Arabic 
ḫabar
/
ʾaḫbār
), or 
ketāb-hā
‘books’ alongside 
kotob
(Arabic 
kitāb
/
kutub
). In some words, the broken plural is treated as a singular, for example, 
arbāb
‘master’ (Arabic 
ʾarbāb
, plural of 
rabb
), which may obtain a Persian plural 
ending, 
arbāb-hā
‘masters’.
An interesting development has taken place in the representation of the Arabic 
feminine ending 
-at
, which appears in Persian sometimes as 
-at 
and sometimes 
as 
-e
(written with silent 
-h
). According to Perry’s (1991) analysis of the distribu
-
tion of these two endings, feminine words with the ending 
-at 
belong to a literary 
tradition and generally have a more abstract meaning, whereas words with the 
ending 
-e
have a more specific or concrete meaning and go back to spoken inter-
action. In some words, this has led to a contrast, for example, 
baladiyat 
‘expertise’ 
versus 
baladiye 
‘town council’.
The verbal morphology of Arabic is even less suited than its nominal morphology 
to integrate into the structure of Persian. Therefore, verbo-nominal compounds 
are used as a periphrastic device to avoid the need to inflect the Arabic loans. 
Most compounds contain the dummy verbs 
kardan
‘to do’ and 
šodan
‘to become’ 
in combination with Arabic verbal nouns, participles or adjectives. Examples 
abound:
mokātebe kardan
‘to correspond’, lit. ‘to make correspondence’ (Arabic 
mukātaba
)
taʾlim kardan
‘to teach’, lit. ‘to make instruction’ (Arabic 
taʿlīm
)
fekr kardan
‘to think’, lit. ‘to make thought’ (Arabic 
fikr
)
harakat kardan
‘to set out’, lit. ‘to make movement’ (Arabic 
ḥaraka
)
sabr kardan
‘to wait’, lit. ‘to make patience’ (Arabic 
ṣabr
)
maġlub kardan
‘to defeat’, lit. ‘to make defeated’ (Arabic 
maġlūb
)
There is a regular correspondence between active compounds with 
kardan
and 
passive with 
šodan
:
eʾlām kardan
‘to announce’/
eʾlām šodan
‘to be announced’ (Arabic 
ʾiʿlām
)
rāzi kardan
‘to satisfy’/
rāzi šodan
‘to be satisfied’ (Arabic 
rāḍī
)
asir kardan
‘to take prisoner’/
asir šodan
‘to be taken prisoner’ (Arabic 
ʾasīr
)

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324
The Arabic Language
When these compounds are connected with pronominal objects, the suffix is 
added to the nominal part of the compound, for example, 
ḫabar-ešan kard
‘he 
informed them’, lit. ‘he made their news’.
There is extensive borrowing even in the case of prepositions, often compounded 
with a Persian preposition, for instance, 
baʾd az
‘after’ (Arabic 
baʿda
+ Persian 
ʾaz
), 
bar lahe
‘for’ (Persian 
bar
+ Arabic 
lahu
‘for him’) and 
bar aleh
‘against’ (Persian 
bar
+ Arabic 
ʿalayhi
‘against him’), for example, 
ġāzi bar lahe u hokm dād
‘the judge 
made a judgement in his favour’. Many conjunctions in Persian are formed with 
Arabic words, for example, 
vaġtike
‘when’ (Arabic 
waqt
‘time’), 
mādāmi ke
‘as long 
as’ (Arabic 
mā dāma
), 
ġablazānke
‘before’ (Arabic 
qabla
). As in other languages that 
have borrowed extensively from Arabic, certain indeclinable particles have been 
taken over as well, for example, 
hattā
‘even’, 
faġat
‘only’, 
dāyeman
‘continually’, 
bal
(usually with Persian suffix 
ke
) ‘but’, 
va
‘and’, 
ammā
‘as for, but’, 
lāken
‘but’.