TEHRAN -- At a gathering marking Persian Poetry and Literature Day and commemorating the poet Shahriar, the scholar of Persian literature and Shahnameh studies Mahmoud Omidsalar turned his attention to a question that is at once linguistic, historical, and deeply political: Who, exactly, owns the Persian language?
Speaking at the Miras-e Maktub Institute in Tehran, Omidsalar challenged the notion that Persian belongs to a distinct ethnic group—the so-called “Persians”—and argued instead that literary Persian emerged through the contributions of intellectuals and writers from across the Iranian cultural world.
His argument begins with a distinction often obscured in discussions of language and identity. A mother tongue, he explained, is acquired naturally in childhood and transmitted through everyday speech. 
A literary language is something different: a codified, written language learned through education, shaped over generations by writers, scholars and other cultural elites. It is therefore not necessarily anyone’s household language.
Persian, in this sense, is not simply the spoken language of one community. Its literary form was cultivated by people whose everyday speech could be Kurdish, Turkish, Gilaki, Mazandarani, Balochi, Arabic or one of the many other languages and dialects spoken across Iran and the wider Persianate world.
The literary history itself provides some of the evidence. Ferdowsi, Omar Khayyam, Rumi, Saadi and Hafez produced works that became part of a global literary inheritance, even though the polished Persian of their poetry should not be assumed to have been identical to the language they used at home. 
Writers such as Fakhr al-Din As’ad Gurgani, Farrokhi Sistani, and numerous poets from Central Asia and other parts of the Iranian cultural sphere likewise contributed to the formation of Persian literary culture.
For Omidsalar, this history makes the category of a single “Persian people” inadequate as an explanation for the language’s development. Persian became a literary and interregional language through a long historical process in which different communities participated.
He also placed Persian within the broader history of languages that have crossed ethnic and political boundaries. Long before the modern European nation-state, languages such as Latin functioned as literary and administrative means of communication among people whose spoken languages were different.
Persian likewise acquired a broad geographic reach, serving at various moments as a language of administration, literature and cultural exchange.
The comparison with modern European nationalism, Omidsalar said, must therefore be made cautiously. European national languages were often standardized in conjunction with the emergence of modern nation-states. 
Persian’s history, by contrast, substantially predates modern nationalism. Its literary prestige was established over centuries, through the work of writers from diverse regions and communities.
The distinction matters because, in Omidsalar’s view, linguistic difference need not imply political separation. Iran’s local languages and dialects can coexist with Persian as a literary and official language; they occupy different social and cultural spaces. The existence of one does not, by itself, negate the legitimacy of the others.
His larger proposition is less about choosing between languages than about refusing to reduce language to ethnicity. Persian, he says, cannot be understood as the private possession of a single community. It is a literary inheritance assembled over centuries by people of different origins, whose voices converged in a language that eventually came to represent a much wider cultural world.
The result is a paradox at the heart of Persian: a language associated with a particular name, but created by many peoples. Its history is therefore not simply the history of one ethnicity. It is the history of an encounter—between regions, dialects, empires, writers and readers—and of a literary tradition whose authorship cannot easily be assigned to a single tribe.