The Historical Prestige of Persian Language

Because of the social nature of human languages, the people of any society try to credit up the prestige of their own language in comparison to other languages. In the historical contacts of the languages, some of them become more prestigious and come to the level of the “standard language” of a country or countries and become an indicator for validation of other languages. In contrary, it is also possible that the prestige of some others lessens and even they may vanish. According to Pierce, “linguistic prestige” has an interrelationship with “power”, and any prestigious language is supported by a kind of political-governmental, religious, social, cultural power or alike. This article tries to investigate the factors and the degree of prestige of Persian language in a historical point of view, using library data in an analytic- descriptive method. The results of this study show that prestigious condition of Persian language at the first step was achieved because of the necessity of a social unity of Iranian tribes. Then through the passage of history of Iran, Persian language used the advantages of governmental-political, religious, cultural, social, and financial supports and became prestigious. In spite of historical happenings, the effects of above-mentioned factors have caused Persian to be the most well-known Iranian language with the greatest number of speakers so far.