Iranian languages

High school (ages 12+)
People & Society

Name:

Date:

Step 1 · Read the article

Open the article and read it at the level above. Then answer the questions below in your own words.

https://smallwhale.org/articles/iranian-languages

1. What are Iranian languages and where do they come from?
2. Which Iranian languages are spoken today and which have more written traditions?

Write what each word means, using the article.

Do not copy the article. Write two things you learned, the way you would explain them to a friend.

Answers below are taken from the article’s stored facts, so they match what the student read.

1. What are Iranian languages and where do they come from?Iranian languages are a group of languages that belong to the Indo-European family. They all come from a common ancestor called Proto‑Iranian, which was spoken in Central Asia thousands of years ago.
2. Which Iranian languages are spoken today and which have more written traditions?Today, Western Iranian languages such as Persian, Kurdish, and Balochi are spoken by many people and have a long written history. Eastern Iranian languages like Pashto and Ossetian are spoken further east and keep older features.

Proto-Iranian: The reconstructed common ancestor language from which all Iranian languages are believed to have descended.
Achaemenid Empire: An ancient Persian empire (c. 550–330 BCE) whose inscriptions provide early evidence of Old Persian.
Comparative Linguistics: The study of the relationships between languages, comparing their structures and histories to understand their origins.
Lexical Borrowing: The process by which words are adopted from one language into another.