Even after the Arab conquest, Persian remained the language of local rulers, as Iranian administrators, mullahs and traders settled in the cities of Transoxania (which covered much of today's Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan), and is the basis of the language spoken by the Tajiks today.

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His manual on how to blog in the language helped trigger a huge boom in Persian voices on the internet.

BBC: Twitter page in Farsi

In September, when Rita visited Radio Ran, a Persian-language Internet radio station based in a Tel Aviv suburb, the studio was flooded with calls from Iranians around the world.

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