A Sociolinguistic Study of Persian in Tehran.

• Author: Kaye, Alan S.
• Position: Reviews of Books - Book Review

A Sociolinguistic Study of Persian in Tehran. By NADER JAHANGIRI. Studia Culturae islamicae, no. 69; Iranian Studies, no. 15. Tokyo: INSTITUTE FOR THE STUDY OF LANGUAGES AND CULTURES OF ASIA AND AFRICA, 2000. Pp. ix + 267.

The author, professor of Linguistics at Ferdowsi University in Mashad, has penned an interesting study with many solid generalizations concerning the sociolinguistic differences to be found within Tehran Persian. The results are based on the speech samples of sixty informants for a total of sixty hours of material. Before delving into substantive linguistic issues, I must alert the reader to the numerous stylistic infelicities, grammatical and printing mistakes of all persuasions, and errors in bibliographical citations. Consider as a typical instance of the first of these the following sentence unchanged from the original: "Normally the level of education has a direct effect on the selection of jobs, as informants with only a primary or no education are usually involved in manual work, while those with a secondary education and higher edudation do mental works" (p. 27). Later on this page, we read about the locality of the city: "Tehran socially has two extreme areas ..." Turning to the final item in the aforementioned list, suffice to note that the article by Carleton T. Hodge, "Some Aspects of Persian Style" (p. 265), is given with erroneous page references (correct to Language [1957] 33: 355-69). It is easy for a reader to become more and more frustrated in trying to cope with the overall lack of editorial scrutiny evident throughout this work.

Chapter 1, "Background," presents information in its section 1 on Tehran and its history, housing, economic structure, etc., while section 2 deals with the history of Persian, non-Iranian languages, and the writing system, among other interrelated topics. Most of this information is not germane to the volume's main subject matter, and, in my opinion, could have been omitted.

The author's ideas on historical linguistic subjects are certainly not mainstream. As illustrative, consider his statement that the Indo-European family is a matter of "belief," since he opines that the Indo-Iranian languages are "believed to be derived from one language called Proto-Indo-European" (p. 16). No one seriously questions this and one can safely change "believed to be derived" to "are derived."

Let us now take up the phonological differences between formal and informal Persian (a key topic in...