TEHRAN, June 21 (Mehr News Agnecy) -- Along with Arabic, Japanese, Chinese, and Turkish, Persian language courses are also now being offered at the State University of Kazakhstan in Almaty.

In the opening ceremony for the courses, cultural figures and scholars from Iran and Kazakhstan stressed the importance of the occasion as another step toward better relations between the two states.

Almaty, the largest city and former capital of Kazakhstan, is a dynamic center of the film industry. Known as one of the most beautiful cities, it has an opera house, a symphony orchestra, a ballet company, a state university, and an academy of sciences.

Persian is the most widely spoken language of the Iranian branch of the Indo-Iranian language group, a subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages. It is the official language of Iran, and is also widely spoken in Afghanistan and, in an archaic form, in Tajikistan and the Pamir Mountain region. Written in  a modification of Arabic script, modern Persian has numerous Arabic loanwords and an extensive literature.

GN/HG