Tolerance Towards Non-Persian Languages in Iran: Myth or Reality?

Behnam Amini – Radio Zamaneh – February 19, 2022

The "#ManoFarsi (Me and Farsi)" campaign, launched in protest against the dominance of monolingualism in Iran’s multilingual society, provided another opportunity to address the fundamental issue of national oppression in Iran. Although opposition and resistance to various aspects of national oppression and historical centralism have existed as long as the modern Iranian nation-state itself, this time, the significant participation of activists from non-Persian-speaking communities in a public discussion through personal narratives added a new dimension to the resistance against national and linguistic oppression.

While a heavy focus on lived experiences and a lack of emphasis on the specialized aspects of the issue may serve as a weakness in such campaigns, it is no exaggeration to say that the public and social nature of this protest against national oppression was precisely what prompted Persian-centric and centralist nationalists to react. From media outlets affiliated with the Revolutionary Guards to monarchists, reformists, and even those advocating for regime change, political differences were set aside as they united to condemn this online campaign and deny the existence of discrimination against non-Persian speakers.

Regardless of which side holds the truth in their claims, it is difficult to deny the growing public awareness and protest language against national oppression. This awareness runs parallel with and complements resistance against gender discrimination and class inequality in political and social spheres, shaking the foundations of defenders of the status quo across all these domains.

The Modern Nature of the Issue

Among the usual rebuttals against claims of national oppression, accusations of "separatism" and the impracticality or unscientific nature of multilingual education have previously been addressed with reasoned and well-researched responses. Notable among these is the recent book Who’s Afraid of Multilingual Education?.

However, the denial of monolingualism and the imposition of Persian on non-Persian speakers in Iran warrants a proper discussion, especially as this policy of denial often justifies itself by pointing to the existence of "linguistic and ethnic diversity" in Iran's history. In other words, Iranian nationalists highlight the linguistic diversity within the country to argue that the mere ability to speak non-Persian languages in Iran is evidence of equality between these languages and Persian, ensuring their survival and vitality, and thus disproving the existence of linguistic discrimination.

The issue with such reasoning is that it not only distorts the reality but also deliberately or inadvertently denies the existence of a systematic structural violence—national and linguistic oppression—that is actively eroding the very linguistic diversity it claims to protect. Understanding this requires a precise framing of the issue.

Contrary to Iranian nationalists' claims, few people attribute issues such as the imposition of Persian and national oppression to centuries or millennia of history. These problems are modern in nature, emerging alongside the rise of nation-state structures. In pre-modern governmental systems, which predominantly took the form of empires, as Ernest Gellner notes, rulers used culture to distinguish themselves from their subjects. Language held a special status in this dynamic. For example, in the Tsarist Russian Empire, knowledge of French was a marker of aristocracy, much like fluency in Persian among elites in the Ottoman Empire and the Indian subcontinent.

With the emergence of the modern nation-state and the ideology of nationalism, this equation changed. Cultural homogeneity between rulers and citizens became a perceived necessity for development and progress. The superior culture defined by the rulers was labeled the "national culture," and as Gellner points out, nationalism essentially involved imposing this superior culture on society. Just as modern factories produced identical goods on a mass scale, national state institutions—such as the military, compulsory public education, and a centralized administrative system—advanced the nation-building project by shaping individuals to fit the standards of the nationalist elite culture and meet the needs of the state and the emerging capitalist society. Language, once again, played a central role, with linguistic uniformity between the state and the nation becoming a foundational element of the new system.

As ethnicity and language became politically charged through their association with state power, significant challenges to nation-building arose in multilingual societies. Elevating one language from among existing ones to the status of the official or state language automatically granted it a superior position. However, consolidating this position, in the eyes of rulers, required the marginalization and restriction of other prevalent languages. Thus, linguistic homogenization policies were initially implemented both in the colonies of Spain, Portugal, and France and within the borders of multilingual countries like France and Italy. Later, these policies became a transferable model for the overwhelming majority of newly emerging nation-states.

The enforcement of such policies was always reliant on violence, legal coercion, and extralegal measures. Depending on the circumstances, this spectrum included policies ranging from banning, erasing, and altering so-called non-official languages to identity denial, forced displacement, and massacres of speakers of these languages.

Homogenization in Iran

Contrary to the claims of Iranian nationalists, systematic governmental efforts to impose Persian as the official language and weaken or eradicate non-Persian languages have existed and continue to this day. During Reza Shah's reign, for instance, the use of non-Persian languages by Iranian citizens in schools and the printing industry was effectively banned. Furthermore, the undeniable reality of the past century is that in a multilingual country, public education has been exclusively in Persian, with no meaningful opportunities for learning non-Persian languages. This alone is solid evidence of deep, structural discrimination against non-Persian speakers.

While countries like France and Italy have been revising their monolingual policies for years, and India recognizes 22 official and educational languages, in Iran in 2021, even acknowledging the reality of imposed monolingualism and recounting its adverse consequences by non-Persian speakers is met with a largely negative and often angry reaction from significant portions of the centralized, Persian-speaking population.

Another aspect of the coercive homogenization and imposition of monolingualism in modern Iran can be termed Persianization, the discussion of which unveils the oppressive nature of Iran's monolingual policy, masked behind a deceptive facade of linguistic diversity.

The Mechanisms of Persianization

Persianization has been implemented both directly and indirectly. Direct Persianization is evident in the renaming of non-Persian cities, neighborhoods, and landmarks into Persian terms. This includes the outright replacement of non-Persian names with Persian equivalents (e.g., Mohammareh: Khorramshahr, Khiav: Meshginshahr, Pehre: Iranshahr) and altering elements of place names into terms often nonsensical or unrelated to their background but familiar to Persian speakers (e.g., Kermashan: Kermanshah, Savalan: Sabalan, Taq-e-Vasan: Taq-e-Bostan). It is striking that the symbolic violence in this form of Persianization—depriving non-Persian speakers of the agency to name their living spaces—rarely stirs emotions among Persian speakers. However, one can imagine a national uproar if, for instance, Tehran were to be renamed to "Tiran" or Kashan to "Kanshah," in response to perceived linguistic violence.

Indirect Persianization, on the other hand, results from the prohibition of systematic education in non-Persian languages while allowing their informal use. In the absence of structured education in orthography, grammar, literature, and vocabulary, proficiency in these languages is limited to learning a collection of words and phrases useful only for everyday conversations. These are typically passed down orally, often from parents to children—provided that the parents wish to teach their mother tongue. In reality, many parents, fearing social isolation for their children, prefer to speak Persian with them. This process produces the so-called "local languages" frequently heard on provincial radio and television networks.

Interestingly, Iranian nationalists often point to the existence of provincial networks broadcasting in non-Persian languages as evidence of the freedom of these languages and the absence of Persian imposition. However, what is spoken in most of these media is, in reality, Persian with a slight flavor of a non-Persian language, due to the lack of formal and systematic education in these languages. Consequently, most fluent Persian speakers can easily understand the majority of content on provincial networks.

A Policy of Death

As Achille Mbembe suggests, this situation reflects a form of necropolitics in Iran's homogenization policies. The modern state places the cultural and linguistic lives of non-Persian speakers at the brink of annihilation, effectively creating conditions for the gradual erasure of these identities through its policies. Walter Benjamin’s description of fascism's approach to disenfranchised masses offers a parallel:

“Fascism attempts to organize newly created proletarian masses without changing the structure of property, which these masses strive to overthrow with all their might. Fascism sees its salvation not in granting the masses rights but in providing them an opportunity to express themselves.”

Similarly, the modern Iranian state, by tolerating the informal use of non-Persian languages while banning their formal education and suppressing the will of their speakers to change these arrangements, secures minimal legitimacy by feigning tolerance for linguistic diversity while simultaneously paving the way for cultural homogenization and the gradual extinction of non-Persian identities.

The languages that have survived these conditions, maintaining their distinction from Persian—at least in written form—owe their resilience to the existence of speakers outside Iran. These individuals often have access to tools, structures, and resources that enable the continued vitality of their languages. This explains the persistence of Turkish, Arabic, Kurdish, and Baluchi. Otherwise, the ultimate goal of Iran's modern homogenization policies can be seen in the fate of languages like Gilaki and Luri, which today are scarcely distinguishable from Persian.

National oppression and linguistic discrimination in Iran are deep-seated and structural problems that require profound transformations in socio-economic relations and the political landscape to be resolved. Nevertheless, the growing awareness and critical sensitivity to these injustices among both non-Persian and Persian speakers, as seen in the #MeAndPersian campaign, mark a significant step toward building the collective consciousness and action necessary to combat discrimination and injustice.


Read the original article in Farsi on Radio Zamaneh's website.