Iranian Linguistic Attitudes and Persian Language Planning: A Case Study in Tehran

This paper aims to evaluate the linguistic attitudes of Persian speakers to provide an information base for language policy-making regardingPersian planning in Iran. To this end, the paper proposes the following questions:- What are the main components of Tehrani Persian speakers’ attitudes?- What is the least important component among the other components?- Regarding the above mentioned attitude components, how could we schematize the dominant overt and covert language planning policies?To fulfill this aim, a questionnaire consisting of several questions on different aspects of linguistic attitudes has been distributed among four groups of Tehrani residents. The questionnaire has been organized so as to evaluate the awareness, affection and behavior towards Persian corpus, status and language in education. The size of the sample population (a total of 820) has been determined based on a formula developed by Krejcie and Morgan (Krejcie and Morgan, 1970). After collecting the questionnaires, the data were then encoded and entered into the SPSS statistical software. The independent variables of this analysis are social identity and age. The instruments used in this study are intersecting or ANOVA tables as well as other methods such as X2, Somer’s, Kramers, and Kendal. The paper concludes that the most important component of linguistic attitudes of the studied groups is affection towards Persian status. The least important components, on the other hand, are Iranian linguistic consciousness, attitude towards English, awareness of Persian status, hopefulness towards Persian improvement and affection towards present Persian planning. Furthermore, it turned out that covert and overt Persian language policies differ in some key aspects.