Spektrum Iran

Abstrakt This article deals with language gendering, a topic often and emotionally debated in Germany. It will in this context be applied to the Persian lan-guage to reflect the situation in Iran. The main question is: how gender bal-anced is the Persian in Iran, i. e. how compatible/revealing is Persian with/concerning the gender issue on the linguistic, cultural and political level? The actual reason for dealing with this controversial, but also current topic is to be found in the differing anthropological self-images being (re-)produced with respective cultural, educational and gender policies of both Iran as a religious democracy on the one hand and of Germany as a secular democracy on the other hand. It seems that language gendering is a field, on which leftish liberal democratic circles – ignoring critical voices from the so called conservative layers of the society - try to create a new human race being defined beyond the category of gender identity, which is the exact opposite model of the Islamic Republic of Iran´s, which has always been considered as regressive and outdated. The author represents a critical view on language gendering since it neighbors on language ideology. Thereby it is not claimed that gender discrimination does not exist. The real question should be: how relevant is language correction for facing real existing gen-der inequality.