The enormous and rich civilization of the consortium Iran—Afghanistan—Tajikistan is only poorly known in the West. One of the factors that impedes wide popularization of the Persian culture, literature and language is the defective Arabic script used to represent the otherwise Indo-European language. Not only doesn’t it provide for broad dissemination in non-specialist masses, but also disimproves the specialists’ and dedicated learners’ experience in productive language use in the modern era governed by the Latin script.
While the Arabic script is omnipresent in the region and while its Persian recension is granted even constitutionally (Art. 15 of the Constitution of the IRI) the prerogative to transcribe any of the numerous languages of the country, the transcriptional universality in the international scope has also been sought by scholars. This conducted to the elaboration by the Iranian National Committee on the Standardization of Geographic names of the Transcription procedure for Iranian toponymic items that has been subsequently adopted and approved by the United Nations in 2012.
An attempt has been made to generalize the application of this standard so that one can write any Persian texts on the basis of this standard. The first step to produce a didactic package for the Persian Latin script has been made at the Iranian Society in Frankfurt, by Dr. Hamid Farroukh: Alefbā-ye 2om: a parallel script for the Persian language. It was firstly intended to educate the young (second generation) Iranians of the diaspora in the environment with no massive presence of the Persian Arabic script-based content.
The Language Planning Committee of the FIAS decided to take over the development activities of the Latin script of the Persian language. It will broaden the scope of the language popularization activities, aiming not only at the young diaspora Iranians, but rather at all the interested learners, laymen and academic. The Committee will eventually produce and publish a minimal didactic package for the language:
- the adapted national versions of the Hamid
Farroukh’s manual “Mā Fārdi Baladim”. Following the versions
in English and German, the next two will be in preparation:
- in French: “Mā Fārdi Baladim — Nous parlons le persan!”
- in Russian: “Mā Fārdi Baladim — Мы говорим на персидском!”
- dictionaries:
- learner’s dictionary;
- probably the Latin Persian ↔ English one.
- a text corpus or a reader. Following “The
Concise Encyclopedia of Iran” and the poetic works of Khayyam and
Hafez, the first probable candidates:
- The Little Prince;
- Five Selected Short Stories by D. H. Lawrence.
The current state of the project and its materials are available at the dedicates site:
The Latin script for the Persian language is not a “romanization”. The detailed argument against this deprecated naming will be detailed here future link.