The Missing Link?

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...