quality:correction
Language of Persia

During the Rashidun Caliphate, the official language of Persia (including Mesopotamia) remained Middle Persian (Pahlavi), just as the official languages of Syria and Egypt remained Greek, both languages came to the region through the conquering Greek Macedonian and Persian Achaemenid empires. During the Umayyad Caliphate, the Umayyads made Arabic the primary language of their subjected people throughout their empire. Particularly, Al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf (661–714) officially changed the administrative language of Iraq from Middle Persian (Pahlavi) to Arabic, this was the first since the Neo-Babylonian Empire that a Semitic language was reinstated as an official language in Mesopotamia (Iraq). Arabic mainly supplanted other Afro-Asiatic sister languages, like Coptic in Egypt and Berber and Punic in the Maghreb region (Berber is still spoken and official in Algeria and Morocco), but the more distant Indo-European languages like Middle Persian and Kurdish proved to be more enduring. Most of Middle Persian structure and vocabulary survived, evolving into New Persian. Persian incorporated a certain amount of Arabic vocabulary, especially words pertaining to religion (and later to science and arts), and it switched from the Pahlavi scripts to a modified version of the Arabic alphabet. Today Persian is spoken officially in Iran, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan.