I find you attractive but I don’t trust you: the case of language attitudes in Iran

Abstract

Although Article 15 of the Iranian constitution endorses non-Persian Languages, speakers of these minority languages are latently obligated to speak Persian, the majority language, in most social settings. Consequently, these Iranian L2 speakers of Persian give rise to certain attitudes towards their accented speech, particularly from speakers of the standard variety. This study investigated these underresearched attitudes about accented Persian. Utilising the verbal-guise technique, participants born and raised in Tehran (where the standard variety is spoken) were interviewed to express their attitudes towards five identical-in-content guises (from different L1s including Arabic, Gilaki, Azeri Turkic, Mazandarani, and Kurdish). The findings revealed that the less the Tehrani interviewees were able to recognise an accent, the more they associated the speakers of that accent with positive traits. Furthermore, most of the evaluations linked the accented speakers with lower social and education levels. Overall, Gilaki and Azeri Turkic were associated with negative attributes, whereas Arabic and Kurdish evoked positive attitudes.

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