ABSTRACT
Persian, spoken throughout the Iranian plateau for over a millennium, has undergone few changes, remaining essentially at the same stage of morphological evolution. The proxim ity of neighbouring languages which belong to different linguistic families (the stronger influence of Arabic on Western Iran, and Uzbek and other Turkic languages on Eastern Iran) , the push and pull of nationalism, and the 50-year experiment with the Cyrillic alphabet in Soviet Tajikistan ( 1940-90) have had little effect on the structural ties among its varieties. Semantically , of course, its different varieties reflect complicated processes of linguistic absorption and appropriation. However, none has been substantial enough to create a new language.
