Linguistic landscape of Tehran's Valiasr Street; North-South Divide Revisited

Linguistic landscape is a research area in sociolinguistics which deals with all observable linguistic data in a geographical area. In this study, first Valiasr Street in Tehran is divided into three districts: District 1 (from Tajrish Square to Chamran Highway); District 2 (from Vanak Square to Motahhari Street); and District 3 (Rah Ahan Square to Moniriye Square). Next, at the final week of the Iranian year, notetaking and photography of the locations have been conducted. Totally, 3180 linguistic data (including huge banners as well as very small stickers) have been collected from which 72 percent are monolingual Persian and almost 20 percent are bilingual Persian-European. The monolingual European and bilingual European-Persian patterns constitute 5.7 and 2.2 percent of the data respectively. Therefore, it is revealed that the most are of linguistic landscape of Valiasr Street in Tehran is in Persian, although the share of non-Persian signs across three demarcated districts is not similar. In the northern districts the share of non-Persian signs is higher than that of the southern district, and the difference highlights the north-south divide. Likewise, the difference in rendering the messages related to the coming year stresses the mentioned divide. The analysis of data related to various businesses also indicate that some businesses such as boutiques, interior decoration firms and travel agencies employ more non-Persian signs.