All of the 85 million population (according to world meter) is Iranian in the sense that the people are citizens of the nation-state of Iran. The population is also quite uniform in terms of religion: over 99 percent are followers of Islam, either Shi‘ite Muslims (estimates range from 89 to 95 percent) or Sunni Muslims (4 to 10 percent). Language, however, is also a powerful or determining factor in individual and group identity, and the population of Iran is anything but homogeneous in that regard. Over two-thirds of the people speak languages or dialects belonging to what is known as the Iranian branch of the Indo-European family of languages. The Iranian languages are thus closely related to some languages spoken in India and more distantly related to Romance, Germanic, or Slavic languages. The most widely spoken of the Iranian languages is Modern (or New) Persian, which is the official and commonly understood language of the country. It is the mother-tongue, however, of only a slight majority of the population, and it is not mutually intelligible with other Iranian languages such as Kurdish or Baluchi. Turkic languages and dialects, which belong to the Ural-Altaic family and are unrelated to the Iranian languages, are spoken by some 26 percent of the population in Iran: by the now mostly sedentary and nontribal Azeri Turks, by the Qashqâi tribal confederation, and by the formerly nomadic or seminomadic tribes usually called Turkomans (Source: Culture and Customs of Iran).
From Persia to Iran: a Rainbow of Cultural Customs and Values
