LINGUISTS from Iran

Top 2

The following people are considered by Pantheon to be the most legendary Iranian Linguists of all time. This list of famous Iranian Linguists is sorted by HPI (Historical Popularity Index), a metric that aggregates information on a biography’s online popularity.

1. Sibawayh (760 - 797)

With an HPI of 61.80, Sibawayh is the most famous Iranian Linguist.  His biography has been translated into 28 different languages on wikipedia.

Sibawayh (Arabic: سِيبَوَيْه IPA: [siːbawajh] (also pronounced IPA: [siːbaweː(h)] in many modern dialects) Sībawayh; Persian: سِیبُویه‎ Sībūye [siːbuːˈje]; c. 760–796), whose full name is Abu Bishr Amr ibn Uthman ibn Qanbar al-Basri (أَبُو بِشْر عَمْرو بْن عُثْمَان بْن قَنْبَر ٱلْبَصْرِيّ, ’Abū Bishr ‘Amr ibn ‘Uthmān ibn Qanbar al-Baṣrī), was a Persian leading grammarian of Basra and author of the earliest book on Arabic grammar. His famous unnamed work, referred to as Al-Kitāb, or "The Book", is a five-volume seminal discussion of the Arabic language. Ibn Qutaybah, the earliest extant source, in his biographical entry under Sibawayh simply wrote: He is Amr ibn Uthman, and he was mainly a grammarian. He arrived in Baghdad, fell out with the local grammarians, was humiliated, went back to some town in Persia, and died there while still a young man. The tenth-century biographers Ibn al-Nadim and Abu Bakr al-Zubaydi, and in the 13th-century Ibn Khallikan, attribute Sibawayh with contributions to the science of the Arabic language and linguistics that were unsurpassed by those of earlier and later times. He has been called the greatest of all Arabic linguists and one of the greatest linguists of all time in any language.

2. Ali-Akbar Dehkhoda (1879 - 1959)

With an HPI of 50.72, Ali-Akbar Dehkhoda is the 2nd most famous Iranian Linguist.  His biography has been translated into 24 different languages.

Allameh Ali-Akbar Dehkhodā (Persian: علی‌اکبر دهخدا; 1879 – March 9, 1956) was a prominent Iranian literary writer, philologist, and lexicographer. He was the author of the Dehkhoda Dictionary, the most extensive dictionary of the Persian language published to date.