Iranian Language Family

The Iranian languages or Iranic languages are a branch of the Indo-Iranian languages, which in turn are a branch of the Indo-European language family. The speakers of Iranian languages are known as Iranian peoples. Historical Iranian languages are grouped in three stages: Old Iranian (until 400 BC), Middle Iranian (400 BC – 900 AD), and New Iranian (since 900 AD). Of the Old Iranian languages, the better understood and recorded ones are Old Persian (a language of Achaemenid Iran) and Avestan (the language of the Avesta). Middle Iranian languages included Middle Persian (a language of Sassanid Iran), Parthian, and Bactrian. As of 2008, there were an estimated 150–200 million native speakers of Iranian languages. Ethnologue estimates that there are 86 Iranian languages, the largest among them being Persian, Pashto and Kurdish dialect continuum.