The Nowruz Dinner Register Problem
Sara, a Year 12 student born in Adelaide to Iranian parents, volunteers to speak at her school's Nowruz assembly. Her Persian teacher praises her draft, but Sara's grandmother, who left Tehran in 1979, says the speech sounds 'like a newsreader, not a granddaughter'. The draft opens with formal greetings (ba salaam va ehteraam) and uses literary vocabulary such as forugh-e bahaar. Sara's Australian friends will be in the audience; her grandmother and several Iranian community elders will also attend. She has 400 words and three minutes. She wants to honour the elders without sounding distant to her peers, and she worries that switching to casual spoken Persian (goftari) will seem disrespectful to her grandmother.
1. Identify the competing audiences and explain how register choice creates tension between them. Recommend a register strategy for Sara and justify it.
Read the worked answer
Two audiences pull in opposite directions. The elders expect the elevated, bookish register (farsi-ye ketabi) associated with formal occasions and respect; Sara's peers need accessible, warm, spoken-style Persian (farsi-ye goftari) or they disengage. The tension is not just vocabulary: it is the social meaning of register itself. In Persian, formality indexes deference and education, so a fully colloquial speech can read as casualness toward elders, while a fully literary one can read as performance rather than sincerity.
A workable strategy is framed code-switching: open and close in formal register to mark respect (greeting the elders, thanking them), but move into a warmer, simpler middle section for the personal story of what Nowruz means in her family. She can keep literary words to one or two deliberate flourishes (forugh-e bahaar) as a gift to the elders rather than as the default voice. This signals she knows the formal code and chooses intimacy, which reads as competence rather than ignorance.
2. Sara's grandmother says the draft sounds 'like a newsreader'. Explain what linguistic features likely triggered this reaction and how Sara could revise two of them.
Read the worked answer
The grandmother is reacting to features that mark written news style rather than family speech: heavy nominalisation, passive or impersonal constructions, long embedded clauses, and formal connectives (az in ru, dar rabeta ba) instead of conversational ones (khob, yani, pas). Literary vocabulary stacked together (forugh, bahaar, shekufeh) reinforces the broadcast tone.
Two concrete revisions:
- Break nominalisations into verbs. Instead of a phrase meaning 'the celebration of the renewal of nature', say something like 'when spring comes, we celebrate' - a subject-verb clause in spoken rhythm. Verbs make the voice human.
- Replace formal connectives with spoken ones. Swap az in ru for pas or yani where she is explaining, keeping one formal connective at the opening for the elders. The result sounds like a granddaughter explaining, not an announcer reading.
3. Evaluate whether Sara should include any English at all. Justify your answer with reference to identity and audience.
Read the worked answer
A small, purposeful amount of English is defensible; a lot is not. The assembly is at an Australian school, so a brief English framing line (for example, explaining what haft-sin is) helps peers without Persian follow, and it honestly reflects Sara's bilingual reality. Erasing English entirely can perform a purity she does not have.
However, English should not carry the emotional core. If the personal story is in English, the elders become spectators and Sara's Persian identity becomes decorative. The strongest choice keeps the story and the greeting in Persian, uses one short English bridge for the non-Persian audience, and returns to Persian for the close. This models the domain idea that identity is expressed through language choice, not through monolingualism.