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Dalton Ascone is a senior at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, majoring in Linguistics, and minoring in Teaching English as a Second Language. Upon graduating, he hopes to remain in academia to pursue his research interests, which include bilingualism, second-language acquisition, and language maintenance in diaspora communities. He wrote this blog post for 418 “Languages and Minorities in Europe” in Spring 2023.
The names of the participants have been altered in order to protect their anonymity.
The Iranian diaspora is diverse and widespread, but if one were to try to describe one trait that unites all its members, it is this: they live their daily lives between a rock and a hard place. Between the broken immigration systems of their nations of residence, the endless coils of red tape they are forced to dance through, and the delicate geopolitical situation of their homeland, for some, the stress is so overwhelming that it becomes mundane. In circumstances like these, one might wonder whether Iranians immigrants would have any mental energy left over for the active preservation of their language and culture.
Most immigrant communities face the pressure to assimilate, especially linguistically; and unfortunately, many lose their own language along the way. Language death in immigrant communities is a topic of discussion so ubiquitous in sociolinguistic scholarship that the human stories can sometimes be lost amidst the statistics. For this piece, I decided zoom in on a simple story: that of a small group of Iranians living in Italy, the systems that shape their lives, the resources available to them and lack thereof, and, most importantly, the effects these factors have on community attitudes towards their own language.
For those familiar with conversations around language death in immigrant communities, the results of these interviews may not be surprising, but I hope that regardless of my readers’ familiarity with the topic, the discussions will be as illuminating for them as they were for me. In order to tell this story, I will need introduce the characters. All of my interviewees belong to a single extended family, some living in the homeland, and others in the diaspora in Italy (although the person who served as my translator during these interviews is a resident of the United States). I will begin with the matriarch of this household, Maryam.
Maryam offered a unique perspective, as someone who emigrated first to Italy and then eventually back to Iran, several decades ago. My interview with her provided me with useful historical context for the resources available to Iranian immigrants, as well as the broader opinions of the Italian public towards this community. She lived in Florence from 1990-1996, and when she arrived there from Iran her proficiency in the Italian language was limited. She quickly signed up for free classes offered out of a local church, and, while she was initially anxious about using the language, her quickly began to grow. The classes were run by a pair of Italian women, but the students were made up of immigrants from various national backgrounds, so Maryam was surrounded by fellow learners and she didn’t have to worry about the embarrassment she felt in the outside world, surrounded by native Italian speakers.
The insecurity she felt is not surprising, in fact, it is natural for any learner of a language to feel a bit bashful when engaging with native speakers. However, while Maryam said most people were encouraging when it came to her learning efforts, Italians were not as warm and welcoming in other areas. She recounted experiences of neighbors asking her to make Iranian food for them, only to come over and captiously pick and nibble at what she had made. In terms of her own language, she encountered Italians who would take offense when she spoke Farsi in their presence, sometimes even assuming she was hiding something from them or behaving suspiciously. These experiences were obviously very stressful for Maryam, and because of them, she and her family rarely spoke Farsi outside their home.
She had two children while living in Italy, and at first, both of them spoke Farsi (although due to watching Italian TV programs, Maryam said that they did have slight Italian accents). However, when the older child, Kiarash, began attending preschool, things began to change. Within just a few weeks he would no longer speak any Farsi at home, only Italian. Kiarash was only two years old at the time. His younger sibling, Siavash, eventually began speaking – but only in Italian. Before she knew it, Italian had become the lingua franca of Maryam’s household, all in less than a month. She found this frustrating as it made it harder to communicate with her young son, as, while she was now quite fluent in Italian, it still was not her native tongue.
Not long after this, Maryam and her husband decided to return to Iran to seek better career opportunities, and they continued to raise their children in Tehran. Kiarash and Siavash soon began communicating fluently and exclusively in Farsi, retaining only bits and pieces of that Italian knowledge as they grew up. Eventually, once he reached adulthood, Kiarash decided to return to Italy, while Siavash came to the US (and became my translator during these interviews). But Kiarash was not the only member of Maryam’s family to immigrate to Italy; her younger sister, Neda, and Neda’s husband, Amin, are residents of Milan. Maryam hasn’t been in Italy in almost thirty years, so it was important that I talk to some of her family members to ensure that I understand what life is like for current residents, and they gave me a lot of useful information about the current state of the Iranian diaspora community in Italy.
Community. It’s a loaded term, isn’t it?
The first question I asked Kiarash during my interview with him was how he would characterize the Iranian community in Italy. He replied quickly and without hesitation: “there isn’t one.” He is not the first person to make this observation. The Encyclopaedia Iranica characterizes the Iranian diaspora in Italy as historically “fragmentary and discontinuous”, with a lack of “cohesive social groups of permanent residents.” In the same article, the Encyclopaedia links the history of Iranian immigration in Italy to the Revolution of 1978-1979. Indeed, the Revolution and the subsequent formation of the Islamic Republic is an unavoidable milestone in the history of the broader diaspora. According to the Migrant Policy Institute, in the years immediately following the revolution, Iranians accounted for a shocking 18% of all international students in the United States. In the present day there are over a million Iranian immigrants in Europe and almost two million in North America.
When I asked Neda and Amin about their experience with the Iranian diaspora in Italy, their views towards the situation were less harsh. They described a few resources that they were aware of, including a Facebook group, which they said was very useful to them early on in their immigration process. This is, technically speaking, a linguistic domain where Farsi can be used, and as linguistics we know that social media can play a role in language maintenance, but it seems that aside from this, resources are scarce. Italy itself has little to no institutional support for the Farsi language. Neda and Amin mentioned a Farsi school in Rome, but it is run by the Iranian Embassy, and, when I asked if they planned on sending their hypothetical future children to this school, they seemed unsure.
Kiarash, on the other hand, was much more certain when I asked him the same question.
“No. I hate the government. I’m not sending them to a school run by the embassy.”
It seems that even what limited resources are provided are not necessarily warmly received by the community, and in this case, for good reason. A school run by an embassy is not a neutral entity politically speaking, and many members of the Iranian diaspora would prefer that their children not have to deal with the aggressive propaganda that they themselves were subject to during their own education. Religion is also a factor. Due to the Theocratic nature of the IR, religion has a strong presence in public education system, which is another experience that many members of the diaspora would prefer not to subject their children to. In the essay "Research in Iran and Iranian Diasporas: Findings, Experiences and Challenges," a review of various studies compiled by the Dānesh Institute, the authors describe the lack of a religiously-unified community the following way: “among the Iranians, the religious dimension is almost completely absent because there is a strong tendency to link it with the national identification.”
The lack of resources for maintaining Farsi is all the more visible when contrasted with the resources provided by the Italian government for learning the Italian language. In Tehran, the Italian embassy runs a school known as the Pietro de la Valle Italian School, a necessary first step in attaining an Italian visa, as graduates earn a certificate of fluency that is necessary to apply. All of my interviewees attended this school, with the exception of Maryam, as the school had not yet opened during her immigration process. All of them had positive things to say about the education program there, with Neda saying she was more fluent in Italian after six months of classes than she was in English after over a decade of English classes in the Iranian public education system. She said her classes at Pietro de la Valle focused on communication skills as opposed to her English classes’ abstract grammar lessons. This is reflective of a broader trend among the Italian public and institutions alike, that being a willingness, and even eagerness, to share their own language and culture, contrasted with a total lack of interest in the Farsi language and Iranian culture.
This trend carries out on both a macro scale, with the total lack of institutional support for Farsi, and on a micro scales, such as the neighbors who rudely refused to eat the food that Maryam made for them. While at first glance, the eagerness to share and teach their language could be mistaken for magnanimity, it could also be described as a sort of paternalistic micro-imperialism, an implicit assumption that it is only natural for non-Italians to want access to their, clearly superior and desirable, language, and out of the goodness of their hearts, they will welcome these unfortunate non-Italians into the club…so long as they are willing to leave their own language behind. So long as they don’t expect any resources for maintaining their own linguistic communities. Is this attitude explicitly stated? No, not at all, but these sorts of dynamics rarely are in this present age of globalization, and the signs are certainly there.
Overwhelmingly, Iranians love their language, which I have seen firsthand during my own experience as a Farsi learner. Farsi is a language of poetry, with rich artistic traditions; roots that run so deep that I worry I could spend a lifetime studying them and still only scratch the surface. They are extremely encouraging of new learners, and they are quick to share their culture with non-Iranians who show an interest in learning. Learning how dismissive and disinterested Italians had been towards my interviewees deeply saddened me, because I could see how that casual cruelty had dimmed that eagerness to share. During one of the interviews, a participant even asked me how I felt when they were speaking Farsi with my translator, and my heart broke a bit as I realized they were worried they had offended me by doing something as natural as speak their native language in my presence.
However, it would be reductive to imply that the attitudes of Italians, be it institutions or the general public, are solely responsible for the lack of cohesive Farsi-speaking communities in Italy. To leave the discussion at the feet of Italians would be to neglect the diaspora’s own attitudes towards their language, and the role that those attitudes play in language maintenance. Iranians clearly value their language, but how does that translate into the difficult task of language maintenance? I asked Kiarash and his wife, Tannaz, if they wanted their future children to learn Farsi, both said that they did. I followed this up with another question: if they had the option to send their children to a Farsi language school, or a school with classes in both Farsi and Italian, would they? Kiarash, Tannaz, Neda, and Amin all said they would prefer that their children receive an education in Italian. When it comes to teaching them Farsi, they’d prefer to do that at home. Tannaz said she wants to be the one to teach them to write in Farsi, to introduce them to poetry, etc. There is obviously nothing wrong with this approach, and, given the lack of resources available, even if they wanted to give their children an education in Farsi, it is unlikely that they would be able to do so.
However, one must wonder, with such limited domains of use, will these children be able to achieve fluency? At the age of two, it took Kiarash only a few months of Italian public education to begin speaking exclusively in Italian. Without any resources provided by Italian institutions and without a wider community to fall back on, will the efforts of their parents be enough? Historically, most immigrants in Iran have been mostly young single men, not families. In some ways, Kiarash and Tannaz, Neda and Amin, will be part the first generation of Iranian immigrants to be permanent residents to start families in Italy. If and when the time comes for them to have children, those children will be surrounded by Italian on all sides. The schools they attend, the television they watch, the websites they visit, will all be primarily, if not exclusively, in Italian. Whether the Farsi language will survive this process, only time will tell.
Bibliography
Casari, Mario. Italy xiii. IRANIANS IN ITALY. Encyclopedia Iranica. 2007.
https://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/italy-xiii-iranians-in-italy-2
Maggiano, Alice. The Iranian Diaspora in Italy. Research in Iran and Iranian Diasporas:
Findings, Experiences, and Challenges, Proceedings of a Conference Sponsored by the Dānesh Institute Inc., 2015.
Lai, Tianjian. Immigrants from Iran in the United States. Migrant Policy Institute, 2021.
https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/iranian-immigrants-united-states
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