How To Speak Persian Through English a Dictionary

How To Speak Persian Through English a Dictionary, 2019

Thinking about my relationship to the Persian language and how I relate to my family I made the project How To Speak Persian Through English. This project is a dictionary I created that contains quasi-homophones, for example, the English words “Good Office” sounds roughly like Khoda hafez, meaning Goodbye. Even though the Persian Kh sounds more like an H than a G, when said rapidly, and in the right context of casual conversation, this difference is overlooked, and the word is understood by a native speaker. This project allows the reader to communicate and “speak” someone else's language without the inconvenience of having to learn it. How To Speak Persian Through English came out of the experience of relearning Persian, my method of remembering new words was through English word combinations. I think of this project as a metaphor of how I connect to my family and culture by coming from a different place and speaking a different language while trying to meet them in the middle. This project comments in a humorous way on my own search for place, how migrants and foreigners are always feeling out of place and trying to connect to language on different levels by navigating disjoint meaning, where good office has nothing to do with goodbye.