Cultural and Linguistic Considerations: The Case of Persian

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to introduce the reader to the Persian language of Iran while embedding it in the larger context of Persian culture and Iranian-Americans. It will provide the practicing speech-language pathologist's (SLPs) basic information about the linguistic structure of Persian, as spoken by Iranian-Americans to facilitate the provision of a culturally and linguistically appropriate evaluation of Persian heritage language speakers living in the United States. According to the language use data collected by the United States Census Bureau of the 67 Indo-European languages spoken in U.S. homes, Persian ranked 9th above Greek, Urdu, and Gujarathi (U.S. Census Bureau, n.d.). This is a surprising fact given the dearth of published research on Heritage speakers of Persian learning English and living in the United States. This phenomenon may partly be a consequence of the fact that the majority of Iranians value education and literacy and report high proficiency in English. Nevertheless, the potential risk that Iranian-Americans may be over- or under- identified may be greater than for other minority groups in the US due to the lack of information readily available to clinicians.