Watching the protests in Iran, I’ve noticed a lot of signs in English and saw images of the baton wielding motorcycle thugs with “POLICE” on the back of their jackets. Is English spoken fairly commonly in Iran?
No, but English is commonly spoken by people whose goal is to get on English-language TV. Every massive protest in the world has some signs written in English.
From the good folks at the CIA:
Persian and Persian dialects 58%,
Turkic and Turkic dialects 26%,
Kurdish 9%,
Luri 2%,
Balochi 1%,
Arabic 1%,
Turkish 1%,
other 2%
I think students often know it, and a lot of the people involved are in college or graduated in the past several years. Remember that 60% of Iran’s population is under 30.
My brother was a missionary and he’d go to all these far out countries like Zaire (Now Congo), Vanuatu, Bourkina Faso etc and he said it always amazed him, he’d get all this training in the local language and he’d go to this far remote place and there’d always be some guy selling peanuts or running a gas station who spoke broken English.
So it gets around.
My neighborhood is majority Spanish and there are English signs but there are just as many Spanish signs too, so you notice it as much.
58 + 26 + 9 + 2 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 2 = 100
Since I doubt everyone in the country is monolingual, I suspect that’s a list of first language speakers only.
No not really from my own experience, you find students who are proficient in it, but its only a tiny tiny amount of people in specific places.
I encountered lots of English speakers in Tehran, at least in the field of higher education. They kept coming up to me and saying how much they loved America. Some of them said “I went to…” [any of various American universities]. Outside of Tehran, much rarer.
Apparently, Mashhad is a hotbed of Pink Floyd aficionados.
They know all about Roger Waters and, more significantly, they know the moon is all dark.
Link.
Been to Tehran twice and Shiraz and Isfahan as well, finding english speakers outside a few areas was next to impossible.
Accepting that English is not all that common in the general population does this mean that “Police” has been adopted in Farsi? (or did they just buy a container load of POLICE jackets on ebay? 
)
“Police” is a common word in Farsi for “police,” although it’s not the only way of saying it:
They may have decided to use the word “police” rather than the longer term for putting on their jackets. In addition, “police” is originally a French word and is still the French for “police.” In many other languages, particularly European ones, the word for “police” is close to “police.”
Modern Persian uses a ton of French loanwords in everyday speech. When I was in Iran in 1995, you couldn’t find anyone who said “thank you” with the traditional Persian expression motashakkeram, it was always “mersi.”
This is actually what I assumed. I remember during the first Gulf War a news story of the bombing of a supposed baby food factory. And I just knew it had to be real because why else would all the Iraqi factory workers have, in English, “BABY FOOD” written on the back of their jumpsuits. :rolleyes:
The RIAA reports Iran, after China is the biggest violater of copyright via illegal music downloads. So they music is getting in. Where’s there’s music…
A fair point, but given that the average educational expectancy is just 13 years, and literacy is around 77%, I’m guessing that bilingualism isn’t especially common, either.
You don’t get bilingual only from going to school and learning a second language. You can get it because your neighours speak different languages.
Bilingualism isn’t the same as biliteracy; my great-grandmother could only sign her name but she spoke three languages.
That works if you speak Farsi and your neighbors speak Turkic. Given that there are so few English speakers in the country to begin with, it’s unlikely that people would pick it up as a second language without deliberate study.
My point was that, if the list is of first languages, the fact that English isn’t on it doesn’t really tell us anything much about how common knowledge of English is. It’s interesting data, but it doesn’t actually address the question posed in this thread.