Academy of Persian Language and Literature

The Academy of Persian Language and Literature (APLL) (فرهنگستان زبان و ادب فارسی, Farhangestân-e Zabân-o Adab-e Fârsi) is the regulatory body for the Persian language, headquartered in Tehran, Iran. Formerly known as the Academy of Iran (فرهنگستان ایران, Farhangestân-e Iran), it was founded on May 20, 1935, by the initiative of Reza Shah, the founder of Pahlavi dynasty. The academy acts as the official authority on the language, and contributes to linguistic research on Persian and other languages of Iran. The first official attentions to the necessity of protecting the Persian language against foreign words, and to the standardization of Persian orthography, were under the reign of Naser al-Din Shah of the Qajar dynasty in 1871. After Naser al-Din Shah, Mozaffar al-Din Shah ordered the establishment of the first Persian association in 1903. This association officially declared that it used Persian and Arabic as acceptable sources for coining words. The ultimate goal was to prevent books from being printed with wrong use of words. According to the executive guarantee of this association, the government was responsible for wrongfully-printed books. Words coined by this association, such as rāh-āhan (راه‌آهن) for "railway", were printed in Soltani Newspaper; but the association was eventually closed due to inattention. A scientific association was founded in 1911, resulting in a dictionary called Words of Scientific Association (لغت انجمن علمی), which was completed in the future and renamed Katouzian Dictionary (فرهنگ کاتوزیان). The first academy for the Persian language was founded on May 20, 1935, under the name Academy of Iran. It was established by the initiative of Reza Shah, and mainly by Hekmat e Shirazi and Mohammad Ali Foroughi, all prominent names in the nationalist movement of the time. Ferdowsi, in fact, was a motivation behind Reza Shah's decision to remove the foreign loanwords from Persian, replacing them with Persian equivalents.