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

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. A linguistic description of the New Persian of this period is therefore of great importance, not only for understanding the diachronic process of language change leading from late Classical Persian to Modern Persian, but also for synchronic studies of dialectal variations of the period.