Persian and Provincialism

It's been a while since I posted a Persian update here; it was difficult to keep much momentum when the basic alteration from one week to the next was "Learned a bit, forgot a bit, didn't make much progress".  I didn't complete any of my summer exam because I looked at the page and simply couldn't read a word of it.  It took me a while to un-freeze my brain; and by that time, the semester was over and there were no lessons.

My erstwhile teacher has said I should come along to the next level of lessons all the same; but I don't think I'd be up to it - and, anyway, they don't fit easily with my other commitments.  I may resit the beginners' course in semester 2.

In the meantime, and in addition, I've found another Persian teacher, with whom I'm having one-to-one lessons via skype.  Slowly, slowly, I'm making up ground.  But... well, you know there's going to be a but.

It turns out that what I'd been learning at the University last year was very, very formal and rather outdated; were I to turn up in Tehran and speak to people, it'd be somewhat as if Jane Austen were to materialise here.  OK: I'd be understood, but people'd be puzzled, and I might not understand them too well.  What I'm learning now is much more colloquial.  Pronunciation is slightly different, with syllables dropped or contracted into each other; some of the long alephs become vavs, too: thus, for example, "they", آنها (anhā), becomes اونا (unā).  I've also learned that a lot of people really struggle with dipthongs including the vav - many younger Iranians wish it'd just go away.  Thus "sister", خواهر (^khahar), is sometimes contracted to خاهر, on the basis that the و doesn't do anything.  If you're sending a text, those spare characters can be important!  Granted, this kind of shift isn't the sort of thing about which I have to worry a great deal, but the point stands that classroom Persian and everyday Persian sometimes come apart.

(Incidentally, I struggle to pronounce خواهر, however you want to spell it.  It's something like ^khahar; but there's something about the differentiation of the "^kh" sound of the خ, and the "h" of the ه that I struggle to make, and I keep pronouncing the first "a" more like "ar", too.  I don't know why I have a mental block about it - but, on the other hand, I don't have a sister either, so it may not matter much all things considered.)

On a slightly deeper level, most verbs in the simple present are indicated by the prefix mi-.  Hence "To come", آومدن (amadan), becomes man mi'am, to mi'ai, u mi'ad for I/ you/ he or she come(s); "To eat", خوردن (hourdan) becomes man mi'houram, to mi'houri, u mi'houreh.  But some aren't: for example, "To have", داشتن (dāshtan) becomes man daram, to dari, u dareh - except when it doesn't; hence one could say "man mi'daram" for "I have", and people'd think you're from Shiraz, because Shirazis do use the mi- prefix.  (Note that the ending of the third person singular is something else that shifts is colloquial Persian; I'd initially learned that verb endings were basically -m, -i, -d, -im, -id, nd; but they're often, albeit not always, -m, -i, -eh, -im, -id, -n in real life.)



In many ways learning a more everyday version of the language is a good thing.  I think that if and when I next go to Iran, there's a lot to be said for not sounding like whatever the local equivalent is of an eighteenth-century squire.  Still, there is a concern.

I'd assumed that a Tehrani mode of speech would be pretty much standard, much as a London accent is pretty much standard.  (Though imagine what we'd think if someone from Yazd turned up in Manchester and started speaking like someone from Croydon!)  Thus I'd be fine not only in Tehran, but around the whole region - even into Afghanistan and, by switching to the Cyrillic alphabet, Tajikistan.

As it turns out, maybe not.  I've just read this interesting article about the differences between Persian, Tajik, and Dari - or, perhaps, what one might call "School Persian", Iranian Persian, Tajik, and Dari.  School Persian would mean that one could talk and understand to the elites in Tehran, Dushanbe or Mazar-i-Sharif - but go to the bazaars, and it may be a different story:

Consider these paradoxes: A student trained in modern Persian at an American or European university would have no trouble understanding Tajik-medium news on the radio, even though he or she would initially be unable to read the Cyrillic script of print publications. And at bazaars in places such as Bukhara or Khujand, the language encountered — still ostensibly Tajik — would be near incomprehensible to someone with knowledge of “colloquial Persian.” The same goes for Afghanistan and even Iran itself. The formal language of the media is virtually identical (excepting the alphabet in the Tajik case) across borders, while the spoken dialects vary tremendously on a city-by-city, village-by-village basis.

[...]

In other words, the predominant pedagogical approach is a good fit for diplomats, journalists, and literature scholars. Step outside the elite circle, however, and this picture changes dramatically. If by “Tajik” one has in mind the language of the hearth and bazaar, then it turns out there are many varieties of Persian.

Dialects common in Central Asia freely mix not only Persian, Turkic, and Russian words, but grammatical forms and sentence structure as well. Students who achieve high marks in a Tajik program may be surprised to find that the living language they encounter in Bukhara — where the local dialect is understood as “Tajik” — is very close to unintelligible. To engage on that level, one would have to study language as it is spoken, rather than the language as reformists wish it were spoken.

Nor is this situation limited to the former Soviet republics of Central Asia. Although education in formal Persian has penetrated much more deeply in Iran (not having to compete with the imperial language of Russian), Iran is home to a spectrum of local dialects, some arguably more pronounced even than those found in Central Asia. The same is true in Afghanistan, where languages such as Pashto and English provide ingredients for the local dialects.

Students wishing to engage with these colloquial forms are mostly out of luck. Language textbooks and programs strictly hew to the tripartite Farsi-Dari-Tajik division, and when “colloquial” elements are introduced, the variant in mind is that of Tehran, masquerading as a common spoken dialect for the language as a whole.

Now, I'm not sure if this is a two-way thing.  Inasmuch as that the presumption is that Tehrani Persian is the default for any nod towards colloquialism, it might be that that has a universal accessibility in that is not matched by Tajik - much as, I suppose, a Scots speaker will be fine with Stoke English, and so will someone from Singapore, although the Singaporean may by utterly bewildered by Scots.  (Hell, there're plenty of people from Stoke who'd be baffled by Scots as well.)

The point is this; I think it'd be good to have both School Persian and a more colloquial version under my belt - one to be understood, and one to understand.

But it's a bit more to learn, and I'd been so slow in any case that the mountain does feel just that little bit higher.