Abbas Amanat

Yes.

But different food, most important, different accents.

Or different languages.

Since they have dialects.

Baluch is a different language altogether.

But...

Or so for that matter, Kurdish, which is closer to Persian because they are Indo-European languages.

But Turkish, Azeri Turkish, which is probably closer to the Turkish of Turkey, Republic of Turkey, or to the Republic of Azerbaijan in the north.

They are the same, basically.

Actually, if you would have looked, that's a fascinating picture.

If you have looked at the, let's say, even 19th century, early 20th century linguistic map of Iran, you would have been amazed in the number of dialects, in the number of languages that have survived.

This is an ancient country.

It's an ancient land.

And it's a lot of mountains all around it or big deserts.

So there's a sense of isolation.

So you would say here and there you see a different community that speaks differently.

All ancient traditions and languages.

Yeah.

And because of the great number of invasions that Iran witnessed over...

more than two and a half millennia, of course, all kinds of cultures were introduced into Iran.