Languages of Iran

The current Language Policy of Iran is addressed in chapter two of the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran (Articles 15 & 16).[2] It asserts that the Persian language is the lingua franca of the Iranian nation and as such, bound to be used through all official government communications and schooling system. In addition, the constitution also recognizes the Arabic language as the language of Islam, giving it a formal status as the language of religion, and regulates its spreading within the Iranian national curriculum.

Due to the nation's unique social and ethnic diversity,[3][4] the constitution also acknowledges and permits the use of minority languages in the mass media as well as within the schools, in order to teach their literature. The minority languages of Iran do not receive a formal status and are not officially regulated by the authorities.[5]

The first legislation which granted the Persian language its status was initiated back in 1906, as part of an electoral law that positioned it as the official language of the state of Iran, its government, its political institutions and its legal system. In the course of time this enactment was followed by others, which eventually led to a monolingual policy by the Iranian regime.

Perceiving multilingualism as a threat to the nation's unity and territorial integrity, and seeing the need to restrict minority languages’ use and to advance the Persian language's hegemony, Iran's language policy consists of a non-translation outline as well: all government, administration and educational settings are obliged to use merely Persian for any written communication. That includes political institutions (i.e. the Iranian Parliament), official bureaucratic communication (forms, signage etc.) and schooling (all children from the age of six and up are exposed only to Persian as the language of teaching and learning and of textbooks within the public school system). In other words, the Iranian authorities holds that minorities need to learn the Iranian vernacular to an extent that will allow them to communicate with state institutions.[6]

With regard to the Iranian Language Planning, among the institutions accountable for advancing the Iranian Language Planning (e.g. Ministry of Education and Ministry of Science, Research and Technology) is the Academy of Persian Language and Literature, which was established on 1935, under Reza Shah Pahlavi. Constantly seeking to revise and elaborate the nation's official language, this institute focuses on the linguistics of the Persian language and on the internal aspects of Language Planning, rather than on minority languages use within the Iranian society. Other aspects of Language Planning (e.g. sociolinguistic or functional literacy) have not been assigned to a formal institute and are currently handled free of any official master plan, by the educational ministries.[5]

Different publications have reported different statistics for the languages of Iran. There have been some limited censuses taken in Iran in 2001, 1991, 1986 and 1949–1954.[7][8] The following are the languages with the greatest number of speakers (data from the CIA World Factbook):[1]

Classification categories of the spoken languages:

• Indo-European (Iranic mainly, smaller amounts of other branches represented mainly by Armenian, amongst others)
• Turkic (the majority being Azerbaijani, with smaller amounts of Turkmen, Qashqai, and Afshar)
• Semitic (mainly Arabic, but also Neo-Aramaic, Hebrew, and Mandean)
• Caucasian languages (such as Kartvelian, and Circassian)

The following are the languages with the greatest number of speakers (data from the CIA World Factbook):[1]

• Persian 53%
• Azerbaijani and other Turkic dialects 18%
• Kurdish 10%
• Gilaki and Mazandarani 7%
• Luri 6%
• Arabic 2%
• Balochi 2%
• Other languages comprise 1%, and include Tati, Talysh, Georgian, Armenian, Circassian, Assyrian, etc.
• Total population 75,149,669 (2012 census)[9]

A census taken in the Iranian month of Mordad (July 21 – August 21) in 1991. In this census, all 49,588 mothers who gave birth in the country, were issued birth certificates. They were asked about their mother-tongue.[10] which were : 46.2% (Persian), 20.6% (Azerbaijani), 10% Kurdish, 8.9% Luri, 7.2% Gilaki and Mazandarani, 3.5% Arabic, 2.7% Baluchi, 0.6% Turkmen, 0.1% Armenian, and 0.2% Others (e.g. Circassian, Georgian, etc.). The local dialect of Arabic spoken in Iran is Khuzestani Arabic, an Iraqi Arabic dialect, but the varieties of Arabic taught across Iran to students in secondary schools, regardless of their ethnic or linguistic background, are Modern Standard Arabic and Classical Arabic, the latter a liturgical language of Islam.

A recent survey by the US-based organization "Terror Free Tomorrow" with error is +/- 3.1 percent margin and uniform sampling based on provincial populations mentions the breakdown as following:[11]

• Persian 50.5%
• Azeri 21.6%
• Kurd 7.6%
• Gilaki and Mazandarani 6.9%
• Lur 6.9%
• Arab 2.7%
• Baloch 1.4%
• Tati and Talysh 1%
• Turkmen 0.9%
• Other 1.2% (incl. Armenian, Georgian, Circassian, Assyrian Neo-Aramaic and other Assyrian dialects, Mandaic)
• Unknown/refused about 0.5%

In 1986, there was also a nationwide census done on the percentage of Iranians that known Persian, those who do not know and those who know it fluently.[12]

According to the Kurdish-Belgian-American scholar Mehrdad Izady, whose work can be found at Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs, Gulf 2000 Project website,[13] the Iranian census of 2001 mentions that 68% of the population speaks Persian as a first language,[14] while he himself gives the following figures for 2014:

• Persian to include Luri and Bakhtiari 62.1%
• Azerbaijani 13.6%
• Kurdish 7%
• Gilaki 3%
• Mazandarani 2.8%
• Balochi 2.4%
• Arabic 1.6%
• Tourki 1.6%
• Qashqai 1.2%
• Tati 1.1%
• Raji dialect of Persian (not to be confused with the Raji language) 1%
• Turkmeni 0.9%
• Talysh 0.4%
• Other languages include Turkmen, Armenian, Georgian, Circassian, Syriac, Qashqai, Russian, Raji, Minabi, as well as other Western Iranian languages (Lari, etc.)

• Demographics of Iran
• Ethnicities in Iran
• Iranian languages
• Peoples of the Caucasus in Iran

• Ethnologue report for languages of Iran
• CIA FactBook
• Languages of Iran. Atlas