WIKITONGUES: Daniel speaking Farsi

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This video was recorded in the United States by Tushar Rakheja and features Persian speaker Daniel. Persian is spoken in Iran by over 45 million people and worldwide by approximately 110 million, and those numbers are steadily growing. 800,000 Eastern Farsi living in Khorasan speak dialects that are transitional with Persian. Belonging to the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European language family, Persian is of the Southwestern subset. The language holds official status in Iran, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan. Persian's linguistic influence spreads broadly, endowing neighboring Turkic languages of the Caucasus and Anatolia with lexical borrowing, and even bears similarities with Arabic due to the Arab conquest of Iran in the seventh century. Persian maintains a rich, celebrated tradition of poetry that dates to its establishment within early eastern courts. Rumi is one of many celebrated Persian poets familiar to readers around the world, but other celebrities of Persian literature include the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and the prose of Saadi Shirazi.

Translation: "Hello everyone, my name is Daniel. The language I'm speaking is Farsi (a.k.a. Persian).
And I would like to give you some information about the 7,000 years of Persian history. Persia was ruled by many different kings such as Darius, and Cyrus the Great who wrote the first charter of human rights in the world. There exist different religions and languages in Iran. Religions like Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Baha'i, etc. We had different poets in Iran like Sohrab Sepehri, Rumi, Saadi Shirazi, and Hafez. Some of Iran's neighboring countries are Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, Turkey, and Armenia. Iran has the Caspian Sea in the north and the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman in the south. And if you know of any Indo-European languages it will be easier for you to learn and speak Farsi. We've recorded this for the Wikitongues website and thank you very much, everyone. We're at the University of Dallas in Richardson, TX, United States. And, thank you very much everyone for watching this video. Appreciated."