 Persian in peril
Our migrant community, out of fear of being humiliated, are
failing to safeguard this invaluable symbol of their ethnic identity
By Nader
Baghaei-Yazdi
August 7, 2003
The Iranian
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 ["A
mother's response"] 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 "A
mother's response" 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.
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