How many people speak Persian?

No, that's not right. The population of Iran is only 70 million. There's a sizeable Iranian expat community in the USA and I suppose there are others elsewhere, but no way are there 300 million speakers of Farsi. (The modern language is Farsi. If you say "Persian" to a linguist he'll assume you're talking about the ancient language of the pre-Islamic era, the language of Cyrus the Great.)

There are a zillion lists of the "top ten languages" out there, but they're surprisingly consistent. Some include a language they call "Hindustani," which I suppose is their way of saying that Hindi and Urdu are two dialects of the same language regardless of the politics of the region, just like Dutch and Flemish. Some include one called "Malay-Indonesian," by which perhaps they mean Malayo-Polynesian, a large language family that includes many of the languages of the region such as Tagalog, Maori and Samoan. But it's not a single language.

Anyway, the number ten language on the list is either French or German, each of which has fewer than 150 million speakers. So there's no way a language that didn't make the list, like Farsi, could have more than that.

To repeat the answer:

First, linguists refer to the language as Farsi. The native name illustrates the phonetic shifts of the past 2,000 years. Cats and rugs and one Gulf are Persian. Second, there are about 70,000,000 people in Iran who are native speakers of Farsi. There are a few million more expats in other countries. Total is much less than 100 million.

People do refer to the whole set of Iranic languages in the region as "Persian." If you include Tajik, Pashto, etc., you might add ten or twenty million more to that figure. It still won't make the top ten.

The Persian languages are members of the Indo-Iranian group, which is in the eastern branch of the Indo-European family. That includes most of the languages of India as well as the Slavic and Baltic groups and a few isolates like Armenian. The western branch includes the Germanic, Celtic and Romance groups, and a few isolates like Greek and Albanian.

 

As if anybody is going to believe something the CIA says? The same aggregate intelligence establishment who told us that Iraq was responsible for 9/11, rather than the Saudis? They're saying that there are as many Farsi speakers outside of Iran as inside. That figure doesn't pass a reality test. If every single person in Afghanistan and Tajikistan spoke Farsi (and they don't), that's only another 40 million people and we're still 25-30 million short.

As I noted earlier, the Indo-Iranic languages and the Balto-Slavic languages are both in the eastern branch of the Indo-European family. That means that Russian and Farsi are about as closely related as Greek is to Swedish. More closely related to each other than to Greek or Swedish.

Farsi is very closely related to the Indic languages, so Sanskrit sort of bridges the gap between Farsi and Russian. Here are the first ten numbers in Farsi, Sanskrit and Russian.

Yek/Eka/Odin
Doe/Dva/Dva
Se/Tri/Tri
Char/Catur/Cetyre
Panj/Pancan/Pyat
Shish/Sas/Shest
Haft/Saptan/Sem
Hasht/Asta/Vosem
No/Navan/Devyat
Da/Dasan/Desyat

 

Yes, and I spoke to that in my previous post. The total population of those two countries is barely 40 million, and you can bet that nowhere close to the entire population of either country speaks the native language of a neighboring country. Both Pashto and Tajik are closely related to Farsi and AFAIK are descendants of Old Persian like Farsi. But Pashto is not Farsi. I'm not sure about Tajik--maybe it could be called a dialect, I don't know enough about it--but the Tajiks are a tiny population who won't have much of an impact on the statistics.

I repeat, there's no way that there are as many people outside Iran who speak Farsi as there are inside Iran, and that's what it would take to make 130 million, elevating Farsi to the level of French or German, one of which is the bottom language in the Top Ten.

 

"Diaspora" was originally coined in the 19th century specifically for the Jews, and its basic meaning is a total or nearly total migration of a people out of their homeland and dissipation into small expatriate communities in other lands where they nonetheless maintain their identity as ethnic minorities. Since then the usage has widened. The Gypsies come to mind, their emigration from India was total. After being forced out of Florida the Cherokees were initially a majority in "Indian Country," but after it became "Oklahoma" they eventually became a minority; however their community remained more or less intact in a new homeland (less the thousands who died on the "Trail of Tears") so I'm not sure we can call it a diaspora.

To properly call expat Iranians a diaspora I'd have to see a vast majority of them living abroad and they do not. I do not even see a large minority of them living abroad so I take exception to your CIA propaganda (duh):

Fair enough so far. The population of Iran itself is about 70 million so it's easy to count a couple of million more speakers of Farsi in the neighboring countries.

This is where I have my problem. Where are these 70 million Iranian expats living? There's a huge Iranian community in the USA, you'll run into them in any city with a university. Most of them fled the 1979 Muslamentalist revolution. But there are not millions and millions of them! What countries are the hosts of this huge population? Besides America, the other countries with lots of empty space that can accommodate a huge influx of immigrants are Canada, Brazil, Russia and Australia, and I've never heard of gigantic Iranian communities there.

This is a place of science and the Rule of Laplace guides us: Extraordinary assertions require extraordinary evidence. I see no evidence that there are 70 million Iranians living outside Iran. Normally on a forum for tertiary research like ours, a quote from a respected authority is acceptable. But the CIA is not a respected authority. The error rate in their data collection methods is notorious.