"... excellent example... significant contribution... an important interdisciplinary work... " -- Middle East Journal "... an important contribution to aspects of Iranian social communication and interpersonal verbal behavior." -- Language By showing the reader the intricacies of face-to-face sociolinguistic interaction, William Beeman provides a key to understanding Iranian social and political life. Beeman's study in cross-cultural linguistics will clearly be a model for the study of different languages and cultures.

This book unravels the story of English, the language of "the enemies", in post-revolutionary Iran. Situating English within the nation's broader social, political, economic and historical contexts, the book explores the politics, causes, and agents of the two diverging trends of indigenization/localization and internationalization/Anglo-Americanization in English education in Iran over the past three decades.

“By a wide margin, this book is the most sophisticated treatment of the internal dynamics and paradoxes of Iranian politics that I know of.” —Nader Hashemi, Director of the Center for Middle East Studies This volume provides an unparalleled and timely look at political, social, economic, and ideological dynamics in contemporary Iran. Through chapters on social welfare and privatization, university education, the role and authority of the Supreme Leader, the rule of law, the evolving electoral system, and the intense debate over human rights within and outside the regime, the contributors offer a comprehensive overview of Iranian politics. Their case studies reveal a society whose multiple vectors of contestation, negotiation, and competition are creating possibilities for transformation that are yet to be realized but whose outcome will affect the Islamic Republic, the region, and relations with the United States. “Offers a realistic, nuanced, and perceptive analysis of Iran’s complex and evolving political system . . . This book would be appropriate as required or recommended reading for any courses dealing with the Islamic Republic of Iran or with the politics of the Middle East, both at the undergraduate and graduate levels.” —Mohsen Milani, author of The Making of Iran’s Islamic Revolution

This book examines the sociolinguistics of some of Iran’s languages at home and in the diaspora. The first part of the book examines the politics of minority languages and the presence of hegemonic discourses which favour Persian (Farsi) in Iran, exploring issues such as language maintenance and shift, linguistic ideologies and practices among Azerbaijani and Kurdish-speaking communities. The authors then go on to examine Iranians’ linguistic ideologies, practices and (trans)national identity construction in the diaspora, investigating both the challenges of maintaining a home language and the strategies and linguistic repertoires employed when constructing a diasporic identity away from home. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of minority languages and communities, diaspora and migration studies, and language policy and planning.

Aspects of Iranian Linguistics introduces readers to recent research into various properties of a number of Iranian languages. The volume consists of twenty chapters that cover a full range of Iranian linguistics, including formal theoretical perspectives (from a syntactic and morphological point of view), typological and functional perspectives, and diachronic and areal perspectives. It also contains papers on computational linguistics and neurolinguistics, as well as the modern history of lexicography in Iran. Various Iranian languages are discussed in this volume, including Hawrami and Kermanji, two of the major dialects of Kurdish, Medival, Classical and Modern Persian, Balochi, Taleshi and Pamir. With the exception of Persian, other Iranian languages had not received much attention in the past. Thus this work, as the first volume ever published on various aspects of these languages and their linguistic properties, is a valuable contribution to our understanding of a less commonly studied language family. The theoretical, descriptive, and applied approaches pursued by various authors in this volume, together with the colorful range of languages discussed, provide a unique perspective that is appealing to researchers in different domains of linguistics and language studies.

When Naser al-Din Shah, who ruled Iran from 1848 to 1896, claimed the title Shadow of God on Earth, his authority rested on premodern conceptions of sacred kingship. By 1941, when Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi came to power, his claim to authority as the Shah of Iran was infused with the language of modern nationalism. In short, between roughly 1870 and 1940, Iran's traditional monarchy was forged into a modern nation-state. In Nationalizing Iran, Afshin Marashi explores the changes that made possible this transformation of Iran into a social abstraction in which notions of state, society, and culture converged. He follows Naser al-Din Shah on a tour of Europe in 1873 that led to his importing a new public image of monarchy-an image based on the European late imperial model-relying heavily on the use of public ceremonies, rituals, and festivals to promote loyalty to the monarch. Meanwhile, Iranian intellectuals were reimagining ethnic history to reconcile “authentic” Iranian culture with the demands of modernity. From the reform of public education to the symbolism surrounding grand public ceremonies in honor of long-dead poets, Marashi shows how the state invented and promoted key features of the common culture binding state and society. The ideological thrust of that century would become the source of dramatic contestation in the late twentieth century. Marashi's study of the formative era of Iranian nationalism will be valuable to scholars and students of history, sociology, political science, and anthropology, as well as journalists, policy makers, and other close observers of contemporary Iran.