Teaching Persian
Language & Literature

Abstract

How can Persian, a dominant language of literature, education, media, and public life, become fragile at the family table? This keynote lecture begins with this paradox. Persian is not globally endangered; it remains a major language of writing, scholarship, media, and everyday communication across several national and transnational contexts. Yet in the diaspora, its future may be far less secure.

The lecture asks what happens when a language remains prestigious, emotionally cherished, and symbolically powerful, but is no longer consistently transmitted to children. In many diaspora families, Persian risks becoming a language of memory rather than a language of daily life: heard, loved, and recognised, but not always spoken, read, or passed on with confidence.

Rather than treating language endangerment as a problem confined to small or marginal communities, this lecture uses endangered Iranian and religious-minority languages as a lens through which to rethink the vulnerability of heritage Persian. These cases reveal a crucial lesson: languages are not preserved by affection alone. They survive when communities build the institutions, teaching structures, cultural spaces, and intergenerational habits that allow them to remain socially useful and emotionally alive.

The lecture therefore invites us to see Persian teaching in the diaspora not simply as language instruction, but as an act of cultural preservation and future-making.

About the Speaker

Professor Saloumeh Gholami is British Academy Global Professor at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Cambridge, and was previously Professor of Minority Languages in the Middle East at Goethe University Frankfurt. Her expertise lies in the documentation, safeguarding, and revitalisation of endangered Iranian languages, with particular attention to linguistic diversity among religious minority communities, including Zoroastrians, Jews, and Ahl-e Haqq. She has led major projects on Zoroastrian Dari, Judeo-Iranian languages, manuscript preservation, and endangered-language documentation, and has been actively involved in community-based revitalisation work, including teaching materials for Zoroastrian Dari in Kerman. At Cambridge, she teaches Persian and Zoroastrian literature and promotes Persian as a gateway to the wider Iranian linguistic and cultural heritage.

Discussant

Mark Turin is Associate Professor at the University of British Columbia, cross-appointed between the Department of Anthropology and the Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies. His research focuses on language documentation, revitalization, orality, digital archives, and collaborative work with Indigenous and minoritized language communities in the Himalaya and in Canada. As an occasional BBC radio presenter, he is committed to widening public engagement with anthropology and linguistics. markturin.arts.ubc.ca