New Persian

New Persian (Persian: فارسی نو), also known as Modern Persian (Persian: فارسی نوین), is the current stage of the Persian language spoken since the 8th to 9th centuries until now in Greater Iran and surroundings. It is conventionally divided into three stages: Early New Persian (8th/9th centuries), Classical Persian (10th–18th centuries), and Contemporary Persian (19th century to present). Dari is a name given to the New Persian language since the 10th century, widely used in Arabic (see Istakhri, al-Maqdisi and ibn Hawqal) and Persian texts. Since 1964, Dari has been the official name in Afghanistan for the Persian spoken there. New Persian developed in the eastern Iranian world (Khorasan, Transoxiana, and modern-day Afghanistan/Central Asia) following the Sassanian retreat to Transoxiana after the Arab conquest. It was standardized under eastern empires like the Saffarid, Samanid, and Ghaznavid empires, with early poets such as Hanzala Badghisi and Rudaki writing exclusively in Persian in Khorasan and Transoxiana. Modern-Iran at that time did not speak New Persian. It was linguistically diverse with Middle Persian, regional Iranian languages, and Arabic being the primary languages — only later (10th–11th centuries) did New Persian spread west into modern-Iran and become dominant.