Kurdish Iran/Turkish Iran

This might be surprising, but a whole lot of people in Iran are not actually Persian and don’t speak Persian as their first language. When students in the US study Persian, we somehow assume that it is the first language of everyone who calls themselves Iranian and lives within the border of Iran. While the majority of people in Iran can claim Persian as their mother tongue, many other languages are spoken by people who are Iranian but claim other ethnicities, such as Kurdish, Azeri Turk, Lor, Arab, Balochi, Qashqa’i and Bakhtiar Turkic, Turkmen, and more. All of these ethnicities have their own mother tongues, Azeri Turk making up the largest population, with more than 30% of Iranians speaking Azeri Turkic at home.

When I went through Western Iran, particular the majority Azeri Turk towns of Hamadan, Zanjan, and Tabriz, Azeri Turkish was much more prevalent than Persian, although everyone spoke Persian. Everywhere I went, I heard very little Persian, and people tried to speak to me in Azeri. In Sanandaj, the capitol of Kurdistan province, people used Kurdish as their first language, only reverting to Persian with non-Kurds, I often had to ask people to speak to me in Persian when they first addressed me in Kurdish.

Iran is a vastly diverse country, from the North to South, West to East, not only are the people diverse, but also the landscape and environment. From the steamy ports of the Southern Gulf region to the cool mountain forests of the North, dramatic sparse and rocky area of the West and fertile plains of the East, and the scorching deserts of central Iran. Mashallah, Iran is such a beautiful country, if only more people could discover its true nature and see beyond it bad media image and its crazy leaders.