Literacy in the persianate world: writing and the social order.

• Author: Floor, Willem

Literacy in the Persianate World: Writing and the Social Order. Edited by BRIAN SPOONER and WILLIAM L. HANAWAY. Penn Museum International Research Conferences, vol. 4. Philadelphia: UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA MUSEUM OF ARCHAEOLOGY AND ANTHROPOLOGY, 2012; distributed by University of Pennsylvania Press. Pp. xviii + 437. $59.95, [pounds sterling]39.

This informative and stimulating book is a first comparative study in the historical sociology of literacy in written Persian. It is the result of a series of seminars, the last one in 2006, which resulted in this book. In twelve chapters, divided into four sections. the authors try to show (i) that written language is different from spoken language; and (ii) that Persian offers the necessary data to explore this thesis. The authors come from different disciplines (philology, linguistics, history, and anthropology) and shed light on this question not only from their respective disciplines, but also from the vantage point of different parts of Asia where Persian was or is still spoken.

The editors open the book with a lengthy introduction placing Persian in world-historical perspective as well as discussing its multi-varied role in society and its historical importance. Then follows part one, "Foundations," with three chapters. In the first, "New Persian: Expansion, Standardization, and Inclusivity," John Perry describes how one vernacular form of Persian (Dari) developed into an important written language used in administration and literature; how its orthography became standardized; how it adapted Arabic; how writing literature in Persian led to the writing of dictionaries; and how it offered a lingua franca for the elite of various peoples (Turks. Hindis) ruled by Turkic dynasties that came out of the Persian crucible. Instrumental was the fact that Persian was not considered a threat to Arabic in the field of religion, where it continued to dominate. William Hanaway in his chapter, "Secretaries, Poets, and the Literary Language," tries to show that courtly Persian was the result of interaction between poets and clerks, and later with lexicographers. What helped was that they often were active in both fields, and that they relied on Sasanian epistolary models. He further focuses on why written Persian remained so stable over time (tenth to fifteenth centuries) and across an expanding geographical area, ascribing this to inshii and prosody manuals, collections of letters, decline of Arabic, and...