Language, the Power Tool in Court Newspapers During the Reign of Qajar Dynasty (The Case Study: Ruz-nāma-ye dawlat-e ʿaliyya-ye Irān)

Iranians' first journalistic experience was an entertaining imitation of Western journalism, initiated by the Qajar court and the publication of the first official newspaper in 1860. The government newspapers, in this period, contained insignificant themes such as the description of the Shah's journeys and, written in a secretarial style, played the role of a media displayed the power, the glory and the authority of the monarchy. The court's single-voiced language was used only to propagate and to justify the dominant policies of the monarchy system, and, naturally, left no choice for the opponents. The court's secretarial style of journalism continued to be used up to early 1930s and was faded gradually after the establishment of constitutional government, when nongovernmental newspapers began to be published. It has been tried, in present study, to show how the language of the Qajar court turned into the power discourse and how a language can be used as a tool to justify power. To achieve this purpose, the role of linguistic and rhetoric elements of court language, as a variety, in effective transferring of concepts and the discursive features of such language in terms of existing relations between power and ideology are analyzed through a critical discourse analysis and a functional linguistics approach. The government newspaper "Ruz-nāma-ye dawlat-e ʿaliyya-ye Irān" is examined in this regard, as an obvious example of this type of social language, then the results have been generalized with references to all Qajar court newspapers.