Language colonization or lingua franca? Demystifying the status quo of Persian

Persian, the lingua franca of Iran, is spoken as a mother tongue by all monolingual or polyglot Iranian citizens who belong to a rich variety of pedigree-Iranian ethnic populations, including Gilak, Mazandarani, Baloch, Azerbaijani, Turkmen, Qashqai, Assyrian, Armenian, Lur, Talysh, Tat, and so on. There are random political dissidents who desperately desire to sell their myth that Persian has long been a ‘colonizing’ force, but the vast majority of Iranians earnestly argue that Persian has never been a ‘colonizing’ language; it has always been a lingua franca or a language of communication freely and consciously chosen by the inhabitants of the Iranian plateau who cherished it throughout history. This paper (a) draws on the existing literature on ‘language colonization’ and ‘language weaponization’ to afford a clear understanding of these topics and (b) aims at demystifying the status quo of Persian. It concludes that Persian has never been a colonizing force and argues that the ‘teaching of local languages’ is quite acceptable, but ‘teaching in local languages’ is the call by radical separatist groups who aim at the disintegration of a historically-unified nation.