Carina Jahani: Baluchi language is at an important crossroad

Professor Carina Jahani is one of the prominent Swedish Iranologists who has a great interest in Baluchi language, and for this reason, she has made many trips to Iran and Pakistan and has stayed in Baluchistan-Iran for many years. Professor Jahani’s focus on the Baluchi language is so deep and vast that she can be considered as one of the few Iranian scholars who has devoted her life to the linguistic and traditional similarities between the Iranian Baluchi and other neighboring countries of Iran. She believes that the Baluchi language has not yet achieved its place in today’s modern world and due to the neglect of this language, it has an uncertain future.

Exclusive interview of Ava Diplomatic with Carina Jahani – professor of Iranian languages at Uppsala University

Why did you choose linguistics as your field of study? And why did you become interested in Persian language?

It is a long story but interesting. My interest started when I was 16 years old. But I must add that my field is not linguistics, rather Iranian languages. As you may know, I am a Christian, and when I was a teenager I was a member of a Christian student organisation that had extensive international interactions. At that time, I was interested in learning languages and I was very interested in getting to know other cultures that are not close to my own culture, not languages and cultures such as English, German or French that are close to my own culture.

I enjoyed challenges and hard work and I was adventurous. After finishing high school, I was thinking more about traveling to India, but at the same time, when I was sixteen, an opportunity arose to spend the summer in England. By the way, the family I stayed with planned to immigrate to Iran soon.

I think it was about one or two years before the revolution and the members of this family decided to go to Iran and work in the oil industry. In this way, during a month when I was in England, I heard things about Iran from them, and that’s how I became interested in Iran. Thus, when I saw that I could choose a country between India and Iran and travel there for a year, I chose Iran and then I fell in love with Iran. After that, my whole life was directed toward studying Iran, Iranian languages and Iranian culture.

As I read in your biography, was this the first time you heard the name of Iran?

Yes, it was the first time. I just found out there in England that there is a country called Iran.

Although you have already answered this question in some way, but let me ask separately, how did you learn Farsi?

If you want to understand a culture, you must know its people and interact with its people, you must know their language, otherwise you will always remain a stranger to them.

Of course, in those days, the level of English literacy of the people in Iran was low; I am saying this in the context of thirty-four or thirty-five years ago. I loved the language. In high school, I learned as many languages as I could. That is, when I was done with mathematics, physics, chemistry, and subjects that I didn’t know much about, I would go to English, French, Latin, Greek, and German. I studied all this in high school and after that I was looking for a new challenge. I was looking for something a little different.

How and where did you learn Persian?

In fact, I started learning Persian when I was in Iran. It had been about two months since I had come to Iran with that Christian institution, and by the way, it was right at the time of the revolution. I think it was between November 1978 and January 1979 during those hectic days.

Anyway, I started learning Persian in those days, but then due to the revolution and the presence of other foreigners including some Americans in our group, we had to leave Iran, so we went to Pakistan and stayed in Lahore for 6 months.

At that time, they told me that instead of Farsi, you should learn Urdu language and understand the culture of the place where you are now, but I said to myself that I am not interested in this and I did not want to learn Urdu, but I wanted to I continue studying Persian and they finally agreed.

When we left Iran, I was able to bring some language tapes and books with me and I continued to study Persian in Pakistan. After that, I returned to Sweden, I applied for a student visa to study at Tehran University, and I was a student there from September 1979 until the war started. I stayed in Iran for about two weeks after the war and then I returned to my homeland.

How did you travel to Iran for the first time?

The first time was in the fall of 1978, I am not sure exactly when we entered Iran. We traveled overland from Europe through Turkey and I think we arrived in Iran around late October or early November, I’m not sure of the exact date but it was around this time.

How long did you stay on your first trip to Iran and why did you leave Iran?

Around the beginning of January, I had to leave Iran because of the revolution. This was one of the hardest things in the world for me, because I was really determined to stay in Iran. I think I cried for two or three days when I left Iran. At that time, I was about 19 or 20 years old, but it was then that I saw a verse from the “Psalm of David” from the Old Testament book of the Bible, which said: “the LORD will watch over your coming and going both now and forevermore.” I felt relieved that if God himself has decided my departure from Iran, he will bring me back there. If you go to the book of the Old Testament in the Bible, you can read this verse in the Psalms in the last part of Psalm 121.

Among the many languages and dialects that exist in Iran, including Kurdish, Turkish, and Gilaki, why did you choose Baluchi?

I think this was one of God’s works. When I learned Farsi, I was looking for a topic to write my doctoral thesis and I felt that there are many researchers working on Persian language and there is no need to add my research. After that, I thought of the “Ossetian” language, which is common in Georgia and southern Russia.

I started looking into the language to see how challenging it would be or how interesting it would be to me. Of course, it was an interesting and challenging language, but I realised that I need to know Russian in order to study and learn the Ossetian language, because the research done on the Ossetian language was done in Russian by Russian researchers, and I did not know Russian. But the opportunity came much later. I wanted to finish my PhD thesis as soon as possible because I had my little daughter at that time and I didn’t want my studies to go on forever.

So I had to give up the Ossetian language. The fact that I had to learn Russian first and then go to the Ossetian language made the work process take a long time, but I needed to work on a language in which English would be useful to me, which means that most of the research done in that field be English. Anyway, studying in English was easier for me than studying in Persian. Then I remembered that when I was in Pakistan for 6 months, some people talked to me about a language called Baluchi and said that it is close to Persian and that this language is spoken in a part of Pakistan. I was told that you can also check this language and maybe you will be interested in it. I followed this lead and went to Pakistan to learn Baluchi.

Baluch people consider you as their adopted sister, how did this relationship between you and the Baluch people develop?

During these 30 years, my work has never been a continuous research on the Baluchi language. If I had done this, I would probably have written more articles and learned Baluchi better and done many other things. But at that time I had three children and my parents had also died and I had many family problems and my husband’s family had come to Sweden from Armenia. In addition, I have been teaching Persian language full-time at Uppsala University all these years. But the main point is that when I started researching Baliuchi language, I devoted all my activities to it and since then I have been in contact with Baluchi people and I have never forgotten them.
I have always tried to be in touch with the Baluch people as much as I can. There are few international researchers who are really interested in this language and do not do their activities for their own personal interests. You know that if I had done the research only for my own purposes and benefit and tried to progress only in the academic world, it would have been different, but I try to have a cordial relationship with my Baluch friends because we are all for the same goal. We are trying to develop the Baluchi language. You yourself know very well that the Kurdish language has found its own identity and global position. But Baluch still does not have such an identity and position in the modern world. One of my main interests is to collaborate with Baluch writers and writers so that we can find the place and identity of this language in the modern world.

So one of the reasons why you chose the Baluchi language was that it had not been studied as much as other Iranian languages?

Yes, there were many languages to choose from. Other languages such as Lori, Bakhtiari, or Turkmen. Although the Turkmen language belongs to another family of languages.

Who were the most prominent and important professors and personalities you worked with during your studies in Iran?

About 32 or 33 years ago, when I was a student in Iran, there was a distinguished professor named Mr. Ismail Hakeemi in the Department of Persian Literature at Tehran University, I don’t know if he is still alive or not. He later became the head of the university library. He helped me a lot. It’s been so long since those days that I don’t remember exactly. Of course, I remember that Dr. Abdul Hossein Zarin Koob taught us European literature. And I remember very well that I had chosen these two-unit courses because I thought it would be easier for me than the Persian literature unit.

I have an interesting memory from his class. We were supposed to give an oral presentation about European literature in class; And at this time, I had been studying Persian for about a year or a little less than a year, no one volunteered to give an oral presentation and I said that I was willing to do it in the first week of class. The subject of the lecture was “Medieval” literature presentation. The thing is, I had only seen this phrase in books before and I thought it was pronounced a certain way. So, on the day of the presentation, I mispronounced it and the whole class laughed at me, but the teacher reprimanded them. It was one of those funny incidents that I still tell my students when I start this topic of medieval literature.

Do you have any memories of your other teachers and professors?

I have another strange memory. For example, when the written exams were held in the big exam hall of the university, at a certain time, the inspectors would suddenly leave the hall altogether .I didn’t understand what was going on until I realized that this was a pre-arranged arrangement so that the students could cheat a little. When the inspectors would leave the hall, the students would exchange their sheets, walked around the hall and asked each other questions. After 20 minutes, the inspectors would return to the hall and everything would return to normal. It was a very strange thing.

You have organized many conferences and working groups regarding the effects of sociolinguistic progress on minority languages in Iran, especially the Baluchi language. In your opinion, what position does the Baluchi language have in Iran?

Currently, the language is at a important crossroad that can lead to its destruction or prosperity. What I mean by destruction is that the Baluch people do not possess this language in written form. If they cannot unite and reach some kind of agreement among themselves with the help of the Baluch people of Pakistan and Oman, the Baluch language, if they do not develop a written language, this language will probably not survive.

In this way, the Balochi language will be lost within the next generation or two. Just as this language is almost lost in Iran and among the educated young Iranian generation. Baloch people are becoming more literate generation after generation, even in the villages of Iran, and of course the official language of universities, as well as the media and television in Iran, is Persian.
What happens is that in the first few years of their lives, children interact with the people around them in Baluchi, but during school, their homework and the TV they watch are all in Farsi, and eventually their Baluchi language is, as you Iranians say becomes ‘’diluted’’, to the extent that even if they want to speak in Baluchi , only the verbs at the end of their sentences remain in Baluchi.
Speaking Persian is much easier fro the younger people. When they start a family and have children, they probably prefer to speak Farsi at home rather than Balochi.

This happened in Iran, but to a large extent, Pakistan has remained far away from this situation, which is due to the low level literacy and education of the people in rural areas of Pakistan and the conditions of Baluchistan region of Pakistan. Of course, government support also plays a role in this language development, and one of our key issues is that measures should be taken for primary education in the field of local languages.

Like the Sami people in Northern Europe, the Baluch want to save their language. You know that we also have linguistic minorities in Sweden, we have the Sami people who live in the north of this country, who are nomadic tribes and raise reindeer herds.When the children of these tribes entered schools in the 30s and 40s, they forgot their language and switched to Swedish. This was a big blow to the Sami language and now lot of efforts are being made to compensate for the past.Today, there are policies to support minority languages in our country and Sami language is taught in local schools.

Even in Norway, at the higher education level, there is a university where some courses are taught in the Sami language. It was in this way that the Sami language was not completely lost, and some of our young people today are really interested in the revival of the Sami language. Of course, they also learn Swedish at the same time.

The point here is that learning the Sami language is not opposed to learning the Swedish language. Even as children, we have the ability and capacity to learn two or three languages easily. My own children are bilingual. They both know Armenian, because as you know, my husband is Armenian and they have learned Swedish since childhood. In fact, they had the capacity to learn Armenian and Swedish at the same time. All children have this ability.

The only point here is that when a language is not widely used in society, it will need to be supported and strengthened. In the case of my own family, this was the case in the Armenian language, we did not send our children to kindergarten, but allowed them to spend time with their grandparents (my husband’s Armenian-speaking parents) before starting school, and the children were actually two or three. They were with them every day of the week. In this way, they learned the Armenian language well and later, of course, they also learned the Persian language.

We were in contact with many Iranians through the church, and my children, especially my two older children, learned Persian very well. But none of them showed interest in Baluchi language. They never learned Baluchi and I think they don’t like this language very much; Because they think that this language somehow took some of their mother’s attention from them and encroached on their territory and they even believe that their mother is too interested in Baluchi language.

Source: End of Monolingualism