Is there such ethnic group as "Persians" at all?

Submitted by gato branco (Lithuania), Jan 18, 2018 at 07:26

It is not very easy to define "ethnicity" in Iran.

First of all I even doubt that such ethnicity as "Persians" exists at all. In Persian language you even have no name for it. The people of the center of Iran who speak exclusively Persian would most likely call themselves "Iraani" (pranounced - eerawnee), but so would many people with different ethnical, regional or tribal roots (Gilaki, Mazanderani, Taleshi, Kurd, Lori, Bakhtiari, "Azeri"(more exactly "Turks"), Qashqai etc. Apparently, the impression that I got from Iranians with whom I talked that the national affiliation (namely iraani) matters for the people of Iran much more than tribal or ethnic affiliation and in this respect Iran is very unlike Afghanistan.

So that what is called "Persians" in fact are probably these people who define themselves exclusively as "Irani" as have no further tribal label, and so called "minorities" are those who have an additional tribal label but even most of them would probably define themselves as Iraani first and as tribals or ethnics secondly. So that establishing the percentage of "Persians" is mission impossible. Of course first of all you shall define exactly what you are willing to look for.

Of course you could argue that there is a label "faarsi-zabaanaan" in Persian language. However it means "speakers of Persian" and denotes all the persons that could speak Persian. It seems that virtually all population of Iran nowadays can speak Persian, some exclusively, and some as bilinguals together with some "ethnic" language or dialect (Turkic is the most widespead). And, on the other hand, Persian speakers live not only in Iran, since many of the Afghan and Tajik people also speak Persian. Persian is one of the state languages in Afghanistan (together with Pashto) and the state language in Tajikistan (using the Cyrilic alphabet).

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