Many people continue to believe that “Persian” and “Arab” are interchangeable terms, when, in reality, they are labels for two distinct ethnicities. That is to say, Persians are not Arabs.
With the exception of various minority ethnic groups in Iran (one of which is Arab), Iranians are Persian.
Overview: The Persian people are an Indo-European ethnic group that speaks one or more Iranian languages. The term 'Persian' comes from 'Persis', a region of the Persian Gulf that today is known as Fars Province in Iran. Originally spelled 'Pars' this region was the cultural center of Iran.
Since Persian is an Indo-European language, it is not linguistically related to Arabic. The countries that speak Persian, such as Iran, do share many cultural traits with the Arabic-speaking world.
Intermarriages exist between Iranian Arabs and Iranian Persians. Over 1 million Iranian Sayyids are of Arab descent but most are Persianized, mixed and consider themselves Persian and Iranian today.
Before the First World War, "Near East" was used in English to refer to the Balkans and the Ottoman Empire, while "Middle East" referred to the Caucasus, Persia, and Arabian lands, and sometimes Afghanistan, India and others.
Who is an Arab? Arab is an ethno-linguistic category, identifying people who speak the Arabic language as their mother tongue (or, in the case of immigrants, for example, whose parents or grandparents spoke Arabic as their native language). Arabic is a Semitic language, closely related to Hebrew and Aramaic.
Iran and Turkey are not Arab countries and their primary languages are Farsi and Turkish respectively. Arab countries have a rich diversity of ethnic, linguistic, and religious communities. These include Kurds, Armenians, Berbers and others.
The Arabic language is classified into three different forms: Classical Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic and Dialectal (Colloquial) Arabic.
The speakers of Persian use an alphabet that is based on the Arabic script. The difference between the Persian and Arabic alphabets is the addition of a couple of letters in the former. Otherwise, they are identical. Interestingly enough Persian has also been written in Armenian script.
Despite some resistance from elements of the Zoroastrian clergy and other ancient religions, the vast majority of Iranians became and have remained Muslims. Today 98% of ethnic Iranians, including the population of Persia, are at least nominal Muslims.
Arabs trace their ancestry to the original inhabitants of tribes of Arabia from the Syrian Desert and Arabian Peninsula. while, Persians live in Iran and their neighbors are to the East Pakistan and Afghanistan and to Turkey in the west. Persians are a part of the Iranian inhabitants.
Arabic and Persian are totally different languages, but both with a mostly common alphabet, overlapping vocabulary (nearly all going from Arabic to Persian), and with ties to Islam. The similarity is a bit like that between English and French.
In 1935 the Iranian government requested those countries which it had diplomatic relations with, to call Persia "Iran," which is the name of the country in Persian. The suggestion for the change is said to have come from the Iranian ambassador to Germany, who came under the influence of the Nazis.
The Egyptians are not Arabs, and both they and the Arabs are aware of this fact. They are Arabic-speaking, and they are Muslim—indeed religion plays a greater part in their lives than it does in those either of the Syrians or the Iraqi.
Generally, “Persia” today refers to Iran because the country formed over the center of the ancient Persian empire and the majority of its original citizens inhabited that land. Modern Iran is comprised of a large number of different ethnic and tribal groups.
There are four principal West-Eurasian autosomal DNA components that characterize the populations in the Arab world: the Arabian, Levantine, Coptic and Maghrebi components. The Arabian component is the main autosomal element in the Gulf region. It is most closely associated with local Arabic-speaking populations.
Across multiple sources, Mandarin Chinese is the number one language listed as the most challenging to learn. The Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center puts Mandarin in Category IV, which is the list of the most difficult languages to learn for English speakers.
Egyptian Arabic – Perhaps the most widely understood across all Arab speaking countries.
The Persians are an Iranian ethnic group who comprise over half of the population of Iran. They share a common cultural system and are native speakers of the Persian language as well as of the languages that are closely related to Persian.
Of the Semitic languages—from the Afro-Asiatic family—Arabic is the most widely spoken, but only a small percentage of the population speaks it as a native tongue. The main importance of the Arabic language in Iran is historical and religious.
The Arab World consists of 22 countries in the Middle East and North Africa: Algeria, Bahrain, the Comoros Islands, Djibouti, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Libya, Morocco, Mauritania, Oman, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen.
An Arab can be defined as a member of a Semitic people, inhabiting much of the Middle East and North Africa. The ties that bind Arabs are ethnic, linguistic, cultural, historical, nationalist, geographical, political, often also relating to religion and to cultural identity.
The Arabian Peninsula was the initial site of the out-of-Africa migrations that occurred between 125,000 and 60,000 yr ago, leading to the hypothesis that the first Eurasian populations were established on the Peninsula and that contemporary indigenous Arabs are direct descendants of these ancient peoples.
While modern-day Syrians are commonly described as Arabs by virtue of their modern-day language and bonds to Arab culture and history — they are in fact a blend of the various ancient Semitic groups indigenous to the region who in turn admixed with later arriving Arabs.