Pahlavig
| Middle Persian | |
|---|---|
| Pārsīk or Pārsīg | |
| Region | Sasanian Empire |
| Ethnicity | Persian people |
| Era | evolved into Early New Persian by the 9th 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" is the name given to middle stage of development of the numerous Iranian languages and dialects. The middle stage of Iranian languages begins around 450 BCE and ends around 650 CE. One of those Middle Iranian languages is Middle Persian, i.e. the middle stage of the language of the Persians, an Iranian peoples of Persia proper, which lies in the south-western highlands on the border with Babylonia. The Persians called their language Parsik, meaning "Persian".
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