Iranian languages

This article is about the language family. For languages spoken in the modern country of Iran, see Languages of Iran. For the official language of Iran, see Persian language.

Iranian
Iranic
Geographic distribution	West Asia, Eastern Europe, Caucasus, Central Asia, and South Asia
Ethnicity	Iranian peoples
Native speakers	est. 200 million
Linguistic classification	Indo-European Indo-Iranian Iranian
Proto-language	Proto-Iranian
Subdivisions	Western Avestan † Eastern
Language codes
ISO 639-2 / 5	ira
Glottolog	iran1269
Linguasphere	(phylozone) 58= (phylozone)
Distribution of the Iranian languages in and around the Iranian plateau

The Iranian languages, or Iranic languages, are a branch of the Indo-Iranian languages in the Indo-European language family that are spoken natively by the Iranian peoples, mainly in the Iranian Plateau.

The Iranian languages are grouped in three stages: Old Iranian (until 400 BCE), Middle Iranian (400 BCE – 900 CE) and New Iranian (since 900 CE). The two directly attested Old Iranian languages are Old Persian (from the Achaemenid Empire) and Avestan (the language of the Avesta). Of the Middle Iranian languages, the better understood and recorded ones are Middle Persian (from the Sasanian Empire), Parthian (from the Parthian Empire), and Bactrian (from the Kushan and Hephthalite empires).