Pahlavi Zoroastrian Middle Persian
| Middle Persian | |
|---|---|
| Pārsīk or Pārsīg | |
| Region | Sasanian Empire |
| Ethnicity | Persian people |
| Era | evolved into New Persian by the ninth century; thereafter used only by Zoroastrian priests for exegesis and religious instruction. |
|
Early form
|
|
| Pahlavi scripts, Manichaean alphabet, Avestan alphabet | |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-2 | pal |
| ISO 639-3 | Either: |
| Glottolog |
pahl1241 Pahlavi
|
| Linguasphere | 58-AAC-ca |
Middle Persian is the Middle Iranian language or ethnolect of southwestern Iran that during the Sasanian Empire (224–654) became a prestige dialect and so came to be spoken in other regions of the empire as well. Middle Persian is classified as a Western Iranian language. It descends from Old Persian and is the linguistic ancestor of Modern Persian.
Traces of Middle Persian, or Parsik, are found in remnants of Sasanian inscriptions and Egyptian papyri, coins and seals, fragments of Manichaean writings, and treatises and Zoroastrian books from the Sasanian era, as well as in the post-Sasanian Zoroastrian variant of the language sometimes known as Pahlavi, which originally referred to the Pahlavi scripts, and that was also the preferred writing system for several other Middle Iranian languages. Aside from the Aramaic alphabet-derived Pahlavi script, Zoroastrian Middle Persian was occasionally also written in Pazend, a system derived from the Avestan alphabet that, unlike Pahlavi, indicated vowels and did not employ logograms. Manichaean Middle Persian texts were written in the Manichaean alphabet, which also derives from Aramaic but in an Eastern Iranian form via the Sogdian alphabet.
"Middle Iranian" refers to several languages and dialects. One of these is called "Pahlavi" (Pahlavīk), literally meaning "Parthian", the native language of the Parthian Empire. Another variant is Pārsīk, the native language of Pars, and later official language of the Sasanian Empire. Previously, the languages of the Parthians and the Persians were thought to be identical, and therefore both were referred to as "Pahlavi". Currently the scholars use the term "Pahlavi" to refer to the scripts used for these language only.
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