Ahmadinejad orders foreign words out of Persian language

TEHRAN: Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has issued a new order for the Persian language to be purged of foreign words that have crept into everyday usage, the country's language watchdog said on Saturday.     

"President Ahmadinejad has issued a decree banning the use of foreign words and urging us to find substitutes for those words," a spokesman for the Academy of Persian Language and Literature said.              

He was confirming a report in the Hambestegi newspaper, which said the ultra-nationalist president "has obliged officials to use all cultural means to encourage and educate people to use accurate spoken and written Persian".        

The Persian Academy official insisted that the ruling was nothing new, however, citing frequent government orders in recent years to remove English words from the language.           

In the past, the Persian Academy has coined terms to replace English words such as "helicopter" and "mobile phone". Their new equivalents, already used by state media, are "rotating wings" and "companion phone".          

But the effort has also triggered many jokes, with one popular sitcom on state television coming up with the term "stretchy bite" as an alternative to "pizza".              

The first attempt to take the Persian language back to its roots was made under one of Iran's former kings, Reza Pahlavi (1925-1941), who ordered the Academy to find replacements for numerous Arabic words.