Persian people are originally from the region of Persis (modern-day Fars province) in what is now Iran, and more broadly from the Iranian Plateau in Western Asia.

Who Persians Are

  • Persians are an ethnic group that forms the predominant ethnic population of Iran (historically called Persia).
  • They are part of the wider family of ancient Iranian peoples, who speak Persian (Farsi), an Indo-Iranian, Indo-European language.

Where They Originally Come From

  • The ancestors of Persians were Indo‑European–related nomadic groups who migrated from Central Asia to the Iranian Plateau around the early 1st millennium BCE.
  • These groups settled in a region called Parsa or Persis in southern Iran, corresponding to today’s Fars province, which is why Greeks and others later called the land “Persia.”

Where Persians Live Today

  • Most Persian people today live in Iran, where they make up the majority population.
  • There are also historic Persian-descended communities such as the Parsis in India, who trace their roots to Zoroastrian Persians who migrated from Iran centuries ago.

Persian vs Iranian

  • “Persian” refers to an ethnic and cultural identity, while “Iranian” is a broader national term that includes many ethnic groups (Persians, Azeris, Kurds, Arabs, etc.).
  • Many people whose ancestry is Persian may prefer “Persian” to emphasize cultural heritage—language, literature, and history—rather than just nationality.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.