Mohammad-Reza Bateni

Mohammad Reza Bateni was born on January 5, 1934, in Isfahan, into an impoverished family. Due to his father's illness and the family's poverty, he was forced to leave school at the age of twelve and work as an errand boy in the Isfahan bazaar. After a few years, while continuing to work, he studied at night schools and earned his high school diploma in literature at the age of twenty-three. He then entered the Higher Teachers' College and graduated in English Language and Literature in 1960. As the top student, he was sent to England in 1961 to continue his studies and received a master's degree in linguistics from the University of Leeds. In London, he worked on Persian syntax under the supervision of Michael Halliday, but due to political issues and the non-renewal of his scholarship, he was unable to complete his doctoral studies there. He translated his dissertation into Persian and received his Ph.D. in General Linguistics and Ancient Languages from the University of Tehran in 1967. That same year, he began teaching as an assistant professor in the linguistics department at the University of Tehran, introducing new courses such as psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, and semantics.

Following the Cultural Revolution, he was forced into early retirement in 1981 at the age of forty-seven. From then on, he devoted himself entirely to research, translation, and lexicography. In 1985, he began collaborating with Farhang Moaser Publishers, authoring and supervising English–Persian bilingual dictionaries (including the Pouya Dictionary), one of which won the Book of the Year award. His major works in linguistics include A Description of the Grammatical Structure of Persian (reprinted over twenty-seven times), A Fresh Look at Grammar, Issues in Modern Linguistics, Four Discourses on Language, and Language and Thought. He was also a translator of works in the fields of linguistics, philosophy, and cognitive science.

Bateni viewed language as a dynamic and social phenomenon and opposed a prescriptive approach to the Persian language. His famous article, 'Let Us Write Incorrectly,' a critique of Abolhassan Najafi's book Let Us Not Write Incorrectly, sparked widespread debates about language change and evolution. He believed that change is intrinsic to the nature of language and that efforts to halt it are futile. Bateni passed away on May 11, 2021, in Tehran.