Apparently first used widely in English in the late 1960s or early 1970s. From Persian فارسی (fârsi), meaning "relating to Fars", the Arabicized form of the name of the province of Pars (Early New Persian پَارْس (pārs)) which was adopted in Iran following the Arab conquest of Persia in the 7th century. The sense for the hijra argot is from Hindi फ़ारसी (fārsī) from the same word.
Apparently first used widely in English in the late 1960s or early 1970s. From Persian فارسی (fârsi), meaning "relating to Fars", the Arabicized form of the name of the province of Pars (Early New Persian پَارْس (pārs)) which was adopted in Iran following the Arab conquest of Persia in the 7th century. The sense for the hijra argot is from Hindi फ़ारसी (fārsī) from the same word.
Meanings
(proscribed) Synonym of Persian (the language).
We chatted away in Farsi. 2001, Dan Baumann, Imprisoned in Iran: Love's Victory Over Fear, page 20:
The method of writing Farsi is logical, although reading can be trickier, as one has to guess at the unwritten consonants of unfamiliar words. 1999, Maria O'Shea, Culture shock! Iran, page 75:
In July 1984, Radio Iran Toilers began broadcasting in Farsi from Afghanistan; by the end of 1988 it was transmitting twenty-one hours a week. 1991, Richard Felix Staar, Foreign Policies of the Soviet Union, page 91:
For instance, in Farsi pošt means 'back' (noun) as in pošt=am dard mikonad 'my back hurts' […] 2009, Vit Bubenik, "The rise and development of the possessive construction in Middle Iranian with parallels in Albanian", page 97 in Grammatical Change in Indo-European Languages, Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 305
That the Farsi or Persian is not a language derived from the Pehlevi, but a collateral and independent tongue, seems to be sufficiently certain. 1820, William Erskine, “On the sacred books and religion of the Parsis”, in Transactions of the Literary Society of Bombay, volume II, page 315:
(informal, proscribed) Iranian Persian, as opposed to Dari (Afghan Persian) and Tajik (Tajik Persian).