The beautiful linguistic chaos of modern Iran
Authoritarian governments have pushed Farsi’s dominance – but 59 other languages still thrive
By Peter Trudgill
As we have been made particularly aware recently, Iran has a population of over 90 million. We have been made rather less aware that this population speaks more than 60 different indigenous languages.
When I was at school, Iran was known as Persia – my schoolboy stamp album did not have any pages devoted to a country called Iran. Persia was also the country’s name as used in our history lessons when describing the conflicts between the Ancient Greeks and the forces of King Xerxes and his son King Darius, in the Greco-Persian wars. The country’s ruler was referred to as the Shah of Persia.
Traditionally, the language spoken there has also been called Persian. Iran is the country’s name now, but its language is most often still referred to as Persian, or Farsi.
The Persian/Farsi language is more or less entirely intelligible to speakers of Tajik, the language of neighbouring Tajikistan, as well as to speakers of Dari, one of the major languages of Afghanistan (sometimes referred to as Afghan Persian) – all three are essentially varieties of the same language.
Farsi is the official language of Iran, used for all governmental functions and taught in all the country’s schools. But as we just noted, Iran is an extremely multilingual entity, and in fact, only about half of the Iranian population are currently mother-tongue speakers of Farsi, something which from time to time has given centralising authoritarian Iranian governments cause for concern.
It is true that many Iranians are native speakers of languages that are related to Farsi – Mazandarani is a quite close linguistic relative. Kurdish is also related to Farsi but not nearly so closely; Kurdish speakers constitute perhaps 15% of the population of Iran, amounting to several million speakers.
But it is also the case that large numbers of the Iranian population speak languages which are totally unrelated to Farsi, many of them belonging to the Turkic language family. Altogether, Turkic languages are spoken by about one in every five of the population of Iran.
One such Turkic language is Azeri – which is the official language of the neighbouring nation-state of Azerbaijan and is also spoken in northern Iraq; Azeri is very closely related to Turkish. Another Turkic language, Turkmen – the official language of Turkmenistan – is spoken by perhaps 750,000 Iranians in the north of the country.
Armenian is another indigenous language of Iran, spoken by people who are almost entirely Christian. Speakers of Georgian, a Caucasian language, also have a significant presence in the country.
One major native tongue which serves an important role in Iran is Arabic. There is a local indigenous dialect of Arabic spoken by a few million people in Iran that is referred to as Khuzestani Arabic; it is found in the south-west of the country on the shores of the Arabian Gulf (also known as the Persian Gulf). But, bizarrely, this dialect has no official role in Iran itself: the varieties of Arabic which are taught to pupils in secondary schools there are Modern Standard Arabic, plus Classical Arabic, since that is the liturgical language of Islam.
So, just as Persian itself is spoken natively way beyond the boundaries of Iran, so many of the minority languages of Iran are also spoken by majority communities in neighbouring polities.
BIZARRE
Bizarre was originally a French word which was borrowed into English in the 1600s. It had come into French from Italian bizarro “irascible, tending to quick flashes of anger”, from bizza “fit of anger, quick flash of anger”. The meaning in Italian later evolved to “unpredictable, eccentric” and then to “strange, weird”.
Fascinating. Thank you for that brief overview. 🙂