Language as social practice: Persian newspapers in post-revolutionary Iran

This paper aims to investigate the language used by newspapers in post-revolutionary Iran.More precisely, the paper sets out to analyze how such a language is deployed to representrelevant hegemonic ideologies. The approach adopted for this purpose draws inspiration mainly fromcritical linguistics, where it is hypothesized that, as far as the pertinent metadiscourse goes,media genres serve to activate and perpetuate social power relations. In keeping with thistheoretical stance, the paper argues that socially constructed texts can be said to perform twocomplementary functions; on the one hand, they shed light on the realities experienced in sociallife; on the other, they reveal such aspects of those realities as are constructed through the useof language. It is thus in this context that the media language used in the post-revolutionary Iranlends itself to analytical investigation, where the available data reveal the co-existence of threecompeting discourse processes of ‘Islamization’, ‘Iranian Nationalism’ and ‘Western liberalism’,relating to the third stage development of post-revolutionary Iran.