Persian for science, not for the kitchen
Academy term-making, actual usage, and a policy that calls Persian a "heritage language"
This event is part of a demonstration of what Lera offers for running knowledge events. Its content is written with care and draws on real sources, but the conference has not taken place, and apart from the convener its participants are fictional.
Avicenna wrote the Dāneshnāme-ye ʿAlāʾī in Persian, and al-Biruni wrote his Tafhīm in both Persian and Arabic. A thousand years ago Persian was a language in which one could learn logic, astronomy and medicine. Today an Iranian researcher, whether in Shiraz or in Utrecht, publishes their most important findings in English and keeps Persian for a short abstract, a news report or conversation at home. This talk asks how that shift came about and who benefits from it.
The official answer in Iran, from the first Academy in 1935 to the present, has been term-making. Perry (1985) showed that language reform in Iran, unlike in Turkey, was mostly institutional work from above rather than a movement from below. Today the Academy approves thousands of terms, yet a large share of them never enter an article, a classroom or a laboratory. The problem is not a shortage of words. The problem is that the university's system of evaluation, from the promotion of professors to the rankings, gives almost no weight to an article in Persian. A word no one writes in does not become a scientific word.
Outside Iran the situation is even plainer. In most European countries Persian either has no place at school at all or is taught at weekend classes for migrants' children under the name of "heritage language". At university, too, Persian is an object of study, not a language of study: it is researched in "area studies", but no one expects a thesis in physics or law to be written in Persian. A Persian speaker who studies in Europe learns that their mother tongue is for feeling and the other language is for thinking.
My argument is that this division of labour is not natural; it is the product of policy, both language policy and publishing policy. And the way out of it is neither linguistic purism nor a quarrel between Persian and English. The way out is for a Persian article and an English article to be two equal displays of one work, with one identifier, one review history and one standing. If knowledge written in Persian is seen and cited as much as its English version, a researcher has no reason to set their language aside.
Questions for discussion
- Are research evaluation bodies, in Iran and in Europe, willing to weigh a work first published in Persian as they weigh its English version?
- To what extent is the Academy's term-making an answer to the problem of a language of science, and to what extent a substitute for solving it?
- How can European schools treat Persian as a language of learning, not merely a language of memory?
References
Perry, John R. 1985. "Language Reform in Turkey and Iran." International Journal of Middle East Studies 17 (3): 295–311.
Spolsky, Bernard. 2004. Language Policy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Green, Nile, ed. 2019. The Persianate World: The Frontiers of a Eurasian Lingua Franca. Oakland: University of California Press.