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Middle Persian is the Middle Iranian language/ethnolect of Southwestern Iran that during Sassanid times (224-654 CE) became a prestige dialect and so came to be spoken in other regions as well. Middle Persian is classified as Western Iranian language. It descends from Old Persian and is the nominal ancestor of Modern Persian.

The native name for Middle Persian (and perhaps for Old Persian also) was Pārsik, "(language) of Pārs", present-day Fārs Province. The word is consequently (the origin of) the native name for the Modern Persian language.

Middle Persian was most frequently written in the Pahlavi writing system, which was also the preferred writing system for other Middle Iranian languages. Other forms of written Middle Persian include Pazend, a system that - unlike Pahlavi - did not have Aramaic ideograms and also has a different script. Middle Persian should also not be confused with Manichean Middle Persian, which is a geographically and historically distinct development.

The ISO 639 language code for Middle Persian is 'pal', which reflects the confusion resulting from the post-Sassanid-era use of 'Pahlavi' (a writing system) as the name for Middle Persian (a language). "Most texts, which include translated versions of the Zoroastrian canon, are 14th century transcriptions of texts from the 9th to the 11th century, when it had long ceased to be a spoken language." This late form "is thus not representative of the real state of Middle Persian."^[1]

In the classification of the Iranian languages, the Middle Period includes those languages which were common in Iran from the fall of the Achaemenids in the 3rd century CE up to the fall of the Sassanids in the 7th century CE.

The most important and distinct development in the structure of Iranian languages of this period is the transformation from the synthetic form of the Old Period (Old Persian and Avestan) to an analytic form:

• nouns, pronouns, and the adjectives lost their conjugative suffixes and changed to invariable words used in all grammatical cases.
• the gender and the dual number disappeared.
• prepositions were used to indicate the different roles of words.
• tenses changed from a synthetic form to composite ones.

One can imagine that these developments had to do with the fact that Old Persian, as it appears in the inscriptions of Bistun and Persepolis, could have not possibly been the language of conversation, and it could not have been simplified so much in only 500 years. Thus, one can conclude that Old Persian had been the language of literary writing, which was very different from the spoken language. On the other hand, written Middle Persian was greatly influenced by the spoken form of the language and it could then be said that written Middle Persian is only an indirect continuation of written Old Persian.

The modern-day descendant of Middle Persian is New Persian. The changes between late Middle and Early New Persian were very gradual, and in the 10th-11th centuries, Middle Persian texts were still intelligible to speakers of Early New Persian. However, there are definite differences that had taken place already by the 10th century:

• Sound changes, such as
  • the dropping of unstressed initial vowels
  • the epenthesis of vowels in initial consonant clusters
  • the loss of -g when word final
  • change of initial w- to either b- or (gw- → g-)
• Changes in the verbal system, notably the loss of distinctive subjunctive and optative forms, and the increasing use of verbal prefixes to express verbal moods
• Changes in the vocabulary, especially the substitution of a large number of Arabic loanwords for words of native origin
• The substitution of Arabic script for Pahlavi script.

Pahlavi Middle Persian is the language of quite a large body of Zoroastrian literature which details the traditions and prescriptions of the Zoroastrian religion which was the state religion of Sassanid Iran (224 to ca. 650) before Iran was invaded by the Arab armies that spread Islam.

• Old Persian
• History of Persian language
• Pahlavi Literature
• Iranian Languages vocabulary comparison table