Iranian
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The term Iranian may refer to:
- the inhabitants of the modern nation of Iran, which includes Persian, Azerbaijani, Baluch, Gilaki, Kurd, Lur, Mazandarani, Qashqai, Arab and Turkmen ethnic groups.
- the Iranian peoples are a group of peoples speaking Iranian languages, descending from ancient Aryan tribes, and inhabiting a part of Central Asia on and near the Iranian plateau. The Iranian peoples of prehistory are generally believed to be ancestors of most of the contemporary Iranians, Afghans/Pashtuns, the Tajikis, the Uzbeks (who are a hybrid population of mixed Iranian and Turkic-Mongol ancestry and today largely speak a Turkic tongue), Azerbaijanis (a population that shows strong genetic ties to all of their neighbors in the Caucasus and Iranians, but speak a Turkic tongue today), Ossetians, Kurds and Baluchis and numerous other smaller groups with only a few thousand speakers in northern Pakistan and eastern Afghanistan.
The closest linguistic group to the Iranians are the Indo-Aryans. The division in classification is due to the fact that proto Indo-Iranian language is believed to have split into two branches one of them sometimes referred to as Avestan branch giving rise to Iranian languages and the Vedic or Sanskritic branch believed to be the progenitor of the languages of most languages spoken in Pakistan as well as northern India. Together these two branches comprise the Indo-Iranian linguistic family.
See also: Persian Empire, Aryan, Iran, List of topics related to Iran.de:Iraner