A few years ago in an Anglo-Iranian conference in London to promote the teaching of Persian in the UK, I met a man who introduced himself simply as Bijan. Bijan, was there at the invitation of the conference organisers to speak about his experiences of learning Persian outside Iran. He spoke Farsi flawlessly and without any noticeable accent. Bijan spoke for more than thirty minutes, without using notes and even recited, from memory, a few verses From Saadi's Bustan. Later he showed us samples of his handwriting that were equally impressive.
Bijan, was not Iranian or even of Iranian parentage. He was a Dutchman through and through. Born and brought up in Holland, Bijan had not spent a single day of his life in Iran. His first exposure to Farsi was at the age of seven through the children of their Iranian neighbour who were in the same age group as Bijan and with whom he used to play in the nearby park. From there he had developed an enduring love for everything Persian particularly the language. So much so that in addition to his own Dutch name he had adopted Bijan as his Persian nickname.
In the absence of a Persian school in the town where they lived, Bijan had joined the same home tutorials that the neighbour's children used to attend, the tutor being one of their parents. He continued with his part-time study of Persian through private lessons and self-study well into his late teens.
Although he studied economics in a Dutch university, Bijan had never lost touch with his childhood Iranian friends nor did he cease studying Persian as a serious hobby and at an advanced level. When I met Bijan he could hardly hide his enthusiasm. After nearly thirty years since he had met his first Iranians he was shortly due to fly to Iran, a country he had loved and learned so much about without having seen it even once.
The story of Bijan and his passionate pursuit of Persian should serve as an example for all those parents and their children who are quick to find every excuse to resort to what they call “Finglish”. It is not clear who should take the credit, or the blame rather, for coming up with such a poorly chosen acronym for an emerging combination of Farsi and English or “Finglish” as is suggested by Lilly Ghahremani [“Language Salad“]. Finglish is best suited to refer to a mix of Finnish and English but somehow we have a habit of getting things such simple so wrong.
While I was musing over how to put this wrong, right, it suddenly dawned on me that Finglish could equally stand for: “Farsi IN Great LIngual SHambles”. This is a much more meaningful acronym as it suggests how the Persian dialect spoken in Iran, otherwise known as Farsi, is being corrupted by the Iranian immigrants with little care or consideration for their mother tongue.
The problem as presented in terms of a pair of correspondence between a mother and daughter [“”] on the rights and wrongs of mixing Farsi with English, as spoken by the Iranian émigré community and their offspring, is nearer to a family spat than a serious or in-depth discussion of the cause and cure of this unpleasant habit. Clearly the daughter is fed up with her mum's quibbling over her spoken Farsi. The mother, for her part, is trying to make up for her gnawing remarks by shifting the blame on to her own generation and giving a pat on the back of her daughter for even achieving this far.
Unfortunately, the dimensions of this problem are not confined to the Iranian community in the US. It encompasses an alarmingly large body of the Iranian Diaspora who has settled all over the globe in the last twenty odd years. From Sweden to South Africa, from Bahrain to Brazil this careless and at times deliberate abusage of Farsi among the immigrants of Iranian ethnicity is reaching pandemic levels. So depending on whom you might engage in a simple dialog, you can hear words in English, French, Spanish, German, Arabic and Hebrew suddenly springing up in the middle of an otherwise sound conversation in Farsi.
But have you wondered why should this happen? Perhaps a more appropriate question to answer is why this is a specifically Iranian practice. How many times have you seen the immigrants of French, Italian, Spanish, German or even Arab ethnicity fall into this predicament and get aid from the language of their host nation to communicate with the people of their own ethnic origin? Rarely.
The answers to such questions seem to lie in our deeply rooted “fear of being foreign.” In other words, we appear to carry an innate dislike of our own ethnic identity and abhor the thought of being “different” – a point briefly touched in “” when Ms Ghahremani senior reminds her daughter that how she and her siblings used to kneel down to beg their parents to refrain from speaking in Farsi in front of their American friends, lest they looked down at them in contempt or more likely as non-conformist aliens.
Iranians are extremely good in assimilating within any environment in which they settle. They seem to feel a compelling need to be accepted within their newly adopted community even if this acceptance may cost them the loss of their ethnic identity. More importantly there is strong evidence suggesting that this urge to conform is accelerated by the fear of being humiliated by the dominant society or culture of which they strive to become an integral part. There is an historic precedence supportive of this assertion, this fear of humiliation.
The Greek conquest of Persia by Alexander and the Mongolian rule of the same nearly a thousand years later had no lasting effect on the culture and language our homeland. In contrast, the Arab onslaught of the Sassanid Empire, some fourteen hundred years ago, left an enduring influence on most things Persian, principally the language and the faith. The victorious Arab tribesmen not only occupied the country and enforced their faith upon the vanquished Persians, but also humiliated them for their inability to speak the language of their conquerors. This humiliation reached the point that a new term was coined in Arabic to refer to Persians: Ajam, meaning mute – a reference to their inability in speaking Arabic.
The Persians, who eventually succumbed to this degrading pressure, soon realized that to salvage their cultural heritage, they had to make a compromise. This relatively easy solution meant that the Zoroastrian, Pahlavi speaking Persians had to lose their faith and a large part of their written and spoken language to Arabs. In return they kept certain rituals and traditional ceremonies of their indigenous culture. They lost some and they kept some but the balance was not in their favor.
A direct consequence of this compromise is the language in which, we now write, read and speak. Although we saved a good portion of our vocabulary, it was at the cost of losing the script, syntax and semantics of our original tongue. In return, we received a significant body of Arabic words and phrases. Although in the passage of time, lots of these words lost their original meanings and became in a sense “Persianised” they are still actively used in modern Persian.
Now 1400 years on, Persian is still in peril. We have to witness yet another phase in the corruption of our precious language, because our migrant community, out of fear of being humiliated, are failing to safeguard this invaluable symbol of their ethnic identity. Thankfully, there are still plenty of Bijans in this world whose love for the Persian language and culture transcends their ethnic boundaries.
In this text the terms Persian and Farsi are used interchangeably.
Author
Nader Baghaei-Yazdi, Ph.D. is the Principal Examiner in Persian for the University of Cambridge, Local Examination Syndicate (OCR),Cambridge, United Kingdom.
