The First Five Questions Iranians Will Ask You

Most people arrive in Iran with سلام and stop there, which is a bit like learning to knock and not to open the door. Persian smalltalk with a stranger is not one exchange, it is a short fixed sequence, and the same five questions arrive in roughly the same order from a taxi driver in Tehran, a carpet seller in Isfahan and the man who sits next to you on the bus to Yazd.

The other thing people get wrong is the first question. حال شما چطوره؟ is not a request for information. It is the handshake, and it may be asked of you two or three times in the same minute, each time expecting the same cheerful nothing. Answering it with an honest account of your cold stops the sequence dead.

A note on the respellings below. Persian has خ, the sound at the end of the Scottish loch, and it has غ and ق, which are a sort of throaty g made further back than anything in English. I have written kh and gh for them. That is an approximation and nothing more. Stress in Persian mostly falls on the last syllable of a noun or adjective, and I have marked it with capitals.

سلام works at any hour, with anyone, in any part of the Persian speaking world. There is no morning or evening split to worry about. It is a greeting only, so it will not do as a goodbye; for that you want خدا حافظ.

There is a second greeting with no English equivalent at all, and it is the one that will mark you as paying attention. If somebody is working, or has just finished working, you greet the work rather than the person. You say this to a shopkeeper, a waiter, a driver, a clerk behind a window, a colleague leaving the office.

The standard reply to it is سلامت باشید, salaamat baashid, may you be healthy. Learn the pair together, because being given one half and having nothing for the other half is the most common way these exchanges collapse.

The polite version uses شما, the plural you, which is what you use for one person you have just met, regardless of their age or yours. تو is for friends, children and family. The spoken form contracts است to a short ـه, so the written حال شما چطور است is never said out loud like that.

Have the full reply ready as one block of sound, because the useful part is the question on the end. Without it you have answered and closed the conversation instead of handing it back.

There is a more ornate answer that you will hear constantly and that costs nothing to copy. قربان شما is literally something like your sacrifice, and it functions as fine, thanks to you. It is warm, slightly formal, and it saves you from having to report on your actual condition.

The name question comes early and in a plain colloquial form. You may also hear the very polite version, اسم شریفتون چیه؟, which asks for your honoured name. It is not sarcasm. It is the same instinct that produces قربان شما.

Then the country. The literal sense of اهل کجایید؟ is closer to where do you hail from than where are you now, so it is asking about origin, and answering with the hotel you are staying in confuses everybody.

Name the country and then name a city, because the follow up is always geographic. If you have been to Isfahan, Shiraz or Mashhad, say so here. It is the single piece of information that opens the conversation widest.

These two arrive as a pair and they are the heart of the exchange. The second one is asked often and sincerely, and a general compliment does very little with it.

Attach a place name or a food to it and you have said something. The bridge in that town, the tea at that station, the bread from the bakery on the corner. Specific praise lands as attention paid. Vague praise lands as politeness, which is fine but goes nowhere.

چیکار می‌کنید؟ can mean both what do you do and what are you doing right now, so if you want to ask about somebody's job the cleaner question is this one.

After work come marriage, children and age, usually in that order, and usually from someone who has known you for four minutes. None of it is intrusive in the local frame. چند سالتونه؟, chand saal-etoon-e, asks your age and is a normal thing for a stranger to want to know.

مجردم, mojarrad-am, means I am single. If you would rather not be asked why, the two word escape is هنوز نه, hanooz na, not yet. It is polite, slightly comic, and it closes the subject without closing the conversation.

تعارف is the system of ritual politeness running underneath all of this, and the part that matters for smalltalk is simple: a first offer is not a real offer, and a first refusal is not a real refusal. Tea, food, a lift, a seat, the bill. Offer twice. Refuse twice. On the third pass everybody means it.

When you hear قابلی نداره you are not being given a free taxi ride. You insist, you pay, everyone is satisfied. Said from the other direction, to a guest who is being too shy with the fruit bowl, the instruction is the following, which literally means do not be polite.

This is also why some questions are answered vaguely on purpose. An invitation thrown out once in passing, come to our house, is warmth rather than a plan, and the correct response is warm and non committal. An invitation repeated and pressed, with a day attached, is real. The same goes for compliments on an object: admire somebody's ring or watch too hard and the system may oblige them to offer it to you, which is a reported enough pattern to be worth avoiding.

Do not use تو with a stranger. It is the singular you, and to a shopkeeper, a driver or anyone noticeably older than you it reads as familiarity you have not earned. Nobody will object out loud. شما for everyone until invited otherwise is the safe default, and the only cost of overshooting is sounding slightly formal.

Do not answer the greeting literally. حال شما چطوره؟ in the first thirty seconds is a formality; a list of your ailments belongs to the fourth round, not the first.

Do not take a flat no as the final word on food or hospitality, and do not give one either. ممنون، میل ندارم, mamnoon, meyl nadaaram, thank you, I have no appetite, is the polite decline that does not sound like a rejection of the host.

And politics. You will sometimes be asked directly what you think, and a stranger asking is not the same as a stranger who can safely hear the answer. A short, mild reply and a return question about their city keeps everybody comfortable. Vagueness here is not evasiveness, it is good manners.

Persian is one language across three countries with three names. In Iran it is Farsi, in Afghanistan it is commonly called Dari, and in Tajikistan it is Tajik and written in the Cyrillic alphabet, so Салом is the same سلام you already know. Speakers understand each other, but the everyday smalltalk formulas differ enough to notice.

The clearest giveaway is thank you. Iranians say مرسی, borrowed from French, along with ممنون and the more formal متشکرم. In Afghanistan تشکر is the ordinary choice and مرسی is distinctly Iranian.

Afghan Persian also uses سلام علیکم far more widely as a first greeting, where in Iran it carries a more formal or religious colouring and is heard mostly between men.

Nobody answers the phone with سلام first. The phone hello is الو, borrowed and used for nothing else, often followed by بله, yes, or by an invitation to speak.

When somebody says your name and wants your attention, in person or down a line, the answer is not yes. It is جانم, literally my soul, which does the work of yes, what is it and I am listening all at once. It is affectionate, extremely common, and reserved for people you are on good terms with.

Writing splits the register harder than in most languages. Everything colloquial in this article is spoken form: چطوره for چطور است, می‌رم for می‌روم, and the Tehran habit of turning long aa into oo, so نان becomes noon and مهربانند becomes mehraboonan. A text to a friend is written exactly as spoken. A formal email or letter is not, and it opens with با سلام و احترام, with greetings and respect, where the contractions would look careless.

Which register, when:

Learn سلام, حال شما چطوره؟ and the full reply خوبم، ممنون، شما چطورید؟ and you can hold the first thirty seconds with anybody in Iran. Add خسته نباشید for every person you see working, which in a day is most of them.

The rest is the sequence, and the sequence is short. Name, country, how long, what you make of it, what you do. Have one specific sentence ready for each and the conversation carries itself.