The Missing Link? : The New Persian of the 16th–18th Centuries in Three Socio-Political Spheres

Abstract

The period of the 16th–18th centuries, when the Safavids were one of the major political powers in the region, is an important era for Persian linguistic evolution. New Persian was the literary language and lingua franca of a vast area stretching from Anatolia to China and the Indo-Pakistan Subcontinent, and from Central Asia to present-day Afghanistan and Iran. The later political separation of post-Safavid Iran from Central Asia and Afghanistan led to the dialectal variations of New Persian. The purpose of this book is to provide a description of the New Persian of the 16th–18th centuries with a focus on a certain set of linguistic parameters. A linguistic description of the New Persian of this period is of great importance, not only for understanding the diachronic processes of language change leading from late Classical New Persian to Modern New Persian, but also for synchronic studies of dialectal variations of the period and the language changes due to language contact. It is also of great importance for further manuscript studies and text edition projects pertaining to this period.