Abstract Contemporary Iran is estimated to be home to 75 languages. Yet, since the rise of Persian nationalism over the past century, the state’s language management and policies have granted the official status to the Persian language and script alone and led to regulations prohibiting any public use of non-Persian script in formal signage. Against this backdrop, this paper investigates ideological and political indexical meanings of the de jure and de facto policies as well as grassroots practices by ethnic minority groups with respect to writing and choice of script(s) in Iran. We draw on different government policy documents, and samples of writing on social media by different social actors in different parts of the country. We showcase how the state’s monolingual language policies are contested by the indexical meanings ethnic minority speakers evoke through their specific script choices in their writing on social media spaces. We argue that multi-scriptal writing, by indexing translocal and transnational identities, challenges monolingual policies, with strong implications for national unity.
Mirvahedi et al. (Mon,) studied this question.