METAPHORS IN PERSIAN LANGUAGE DEBATES: CONCEPTUALIZING LANGUAGE REFORM IN TWENTIETH CENTURY IRAN
METAPHORS IN PERSIAN LANGUAGE DEBATES: CONCEPTUALIZING LANGUAGE REFORM IN TWENTIETH CENTURY IRAN

Summary/Abstract: This article examines the role of metaphorical language in Persian language reform debates in Pahlavi Iran (1925–1979), a period when language codification became central to the Pahlavi nation-building project. Drawing on Conceptual Metaphor Theory, the analysis explores how linguistic purists and antipurists employed metaphors from botanical, zoological, political, and medical domains to articulate competing visions of Persian's past, present, and future. The data analyzed in the research is excerpted from a larger corpus of 130 texts written by Iranian intellectuals and published between the 1920s to 1970s. The study focuses on how abstract concepts of language contact and reform were conceptualized in diverging discourses about language through concrete, embodied experiences. The findings reveal that despite their opposing ideological positions, both camps drew from identical metaphorical source domains, demonstrating how the same conceptual mappings could serve radically different argumentative purposes. Purists depicted Persian as a garden requiring weeding of foreign elements or a sick body needing purification from Arabic contamination. Antipurists inverted these same metaphors, portraying purism itself as а disease threatening linguistic vitality. Political metaphors of citizenship and border control further illuminate how questions of lexical belonging and foreignness became representative of broader discussions about national identity. This analysis contributes to a deeper understanding of how metaphors function as the cognitive machinery through which linguistic nationalism operates at the level of thought itself. By naturalizing ideological positions through pre-existing embodied knowledge, these metaphorical schemas reveal language reform as a site where competing visions of Iranian national identity and linguistic authenticity were negotiated through vivid figurative language that made abstract linguistic concepts tangible, emotionally resonant, and ultimately actionable.

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