Official languages Persian Common keyboard layouts Persian keyboard | Sign languages Persian Sign Language | |
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Main languages Persian 53%, Azerbaijani and other Turkic dialects 18% (e.g Qashqai, Turkmen), Kurdish 10%, Gilaki and Mazandarani 7%, Luri 6%, Arabic 2%, Balochi 2%, and other languages (Tati, Talysh, Armenian, Georgian, Neo-Aramaic, Circassian, Hebrew) 1% Minority languages Armenian, Georgian, Circassian, Assyrian, and Hebrew | ||
Different publications have reported different statistics for the languages of Iran. There have been some limited censuses taken in Iran in 2001, 1991, 1986 and 1949–1954. The following are the languages with the greatest number of speakers (data from the CIA World Factbook):
Contents
Classification categories of the spoken languages:
CIA World Factbook
The following are the languages with the greatest number of speakers (data from the CIA World Factbook):
Census in the 1990s
A census taken in the Iranian month of Mordad (July 21 – August 21) in 1991. In this census, all 49,588 mothers who gave birth in the country, were issued birth certificates. They were asked about their mother-tongue. which were : 46.2% (Persian), 20.6% (Azerbaijani), 10% Kurdish, 8.9% Luri, 7.2% Gilaki and Mazandarani, 3.5% Arabic, 2.7% Baluchi, 0.6% Turkmen, 0.1% Armenian, and 0.2% Others (e.g. Circassian, Georgian, etc.). The local dialect of Arabic spoken in Iran is Khuzestani Arabic, an Iraqi Arabic dialect, but the varieties of Arabic taught across Iran to students in secondary schools, regardless of their ethnic or linguistic background, are Modern Standard Arabic and Classical Arabic, the latter a liturgical language of Islam.
Recent survey
A recent survey by the US-based organization "Terror Free Tomorrow" with error is +/- 3.1 percent margin and uniform sampling based on provincial populations mentions the breakdown as following:
In 1986, there was also a nationwide census done. See: (Farhad Nu’mani, Sohrab Behdad, Class and Labor in Iran: Did the Revolution Matter?, Published 2006, Syracuse University Press, 2006) on the percentage of Iranians that know Persian, those who do not know and those who know it fluently.
Other estimations
In 1986, there was also a nationwide census done. See: (Farhad Nu’mani, Sohrab Behdad, Class and Labor in Iran: Did the Revolution Matter?, Published 2006, Syracuse University Press, 2006) on the percentage of Iranians that known Persian, those who do not know and those who know it fluently.
According to the Kurdish-Belgian-American scholar Mehrdad Izady, whose work can be found at Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs, Gulf 2000 Project website, the Iranian census of 2001 mentions that 68% of the population speaks Persian as a first language, while he himself gives the following figures for 2014: