The push towards a Persian national language leads to peripheral nationalisms.
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Production excerpts from Archival's "The Third Path," an upcoming 12-part series covering the recent history of Iran.
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Staff Credits -
Director/Producer: Shannon Niehus
Creative Director: Michael Knapp
Editor: Rosalee Chan
Multimedia Artist: Miriam Heller
Graphic Design: Matt Heller
Visual Effects: Jim Millen
Researcher: Ladan Sepehri and Golzar Sepehri
Assistant Producer: Maureen Sandlin
Production Credits -
DP: William Knights
Camera Operator: Tim Jolly
Grip: Jamie Burr
Video Transcript -
Iran is a multi ethnic state but not a multinational state. The reason is that the various ethnic groups that inhabit Iran have lived together for at least half a millennium. And in that sense, there is a sense of Iranian-ness that can accommodate itself to multiethnicity, to multilingualism.
In Iran only about half the population speaks Persian as the mother tongue. This doesn’t mean that it’s an alien language to the other half. However, in the 20th century, the policies of government have pushed these non-Persian speakers into a position where they resent the predominance of the Persian language, and this had to do something with the state building.
When you have a modern state, this modern state has to function in one language. And so the Iranian state pushed the Persian language. It was determined to reduce the importance of non-Persian languages in the daily lives of people.
And the preference of the governments would have been to have a linguistically homogenous population. This obviously led here and there to the growth of what might be called peripheral nationalisms, where people say, okay, if language is the hallmark of nationality, then we have a different language, therefore we are a different nationality. This then leads to the various Azeri, Kurdish, Arab, Balochi, Turkmen nationalisms in Iran.
So the Iranian state missed the opportunity to create a multilingual sense of nationhood in the same way that India has done it, and by focusing on the central role of the Persian language, alienated a number of non-Persians in the country.
