Gholam-Ali Haddad Adel, the President of Academy of Persian Language and Literature, says there are currently 340 seats of the Persian Language in universities, academies, and learning centres across the world.
Haddad Adel, who is also the head of the Saadi Foundation tasked with promoting Persian language teaching in the world, made the comments at a ceremony marking the 6th anniversary of the establishment of the foundation, coinciding with National Persian Language Day when a software application on learning Persian was also unveiled.
“The Saadi Foundation is an institute established with the approval of the Supreme Cultural Revolution Council in a bid to promote the Persian Language,” he said, as quoted by Tasnim News Agency.
“The sphere of the foundation’s activity mostly covers training for the Iranian children born abroad and interested to keep in touch with their mother tongue,” he noted.
He said scholarships will also be granted those interested in learning and teaching the Persian Language.
Haddad Adel underlined the foundation also compiles books for Persian Language learners.
Persian, also known by its endonym Farsi, is one of the Western Iranian languages within the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European language family.
It is primarily spoken in Iran, Afghanistan (officially known as Dari since 1958), Tajikistan (officially known as Tajiki since the Soviet era), and some other regions which historically were Persianate societies and considered part of Greater Iran. It is written in the Persian alphabet, a modified variant of the Arabic script, which itself evolved from the Aramaic alphabet.
There are approximately 110 million Persian speakers worldwide, with the language holding official status in Iran, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan. For centuries, Persian has also been a prestigious cultural language in other regions of Western Asia, Central Asia, and South Asia by the various empires based in the regions.
