A group of Iranians watching the FIFA World Cup
Persians, also known as Iranians, are an Iranian people that originated in the region of Persia in Central Asia. They speak the Persian language, but they became known as "Iranians" after Reza Pahlavi's changing of the country's name to Iran in 1935. The Persian people have spread their culture as far as Greece and Libya to the west and India to the east, and 49,312,834 live in the Iranian homeland (65% of the population), 8,592,168 in Afghanistan, 6,360,694 in Tajikistan, 3,000,000 in Uzbekistan, 618,000 in Turkey, 405,000 in Iraq, 331,000 in the United States, and many more in Western Asia and Europe.
