The official establishment of the first Department of Linguistics at Tehran University in the 1970s gave an academic prestige to this field of Humanities and made it an attractive discipline for many scholars who had not even heard of it before. At the outset, the research agenda of this department was mainly directed toward historical studies. However, upon the return of some pioneering linguists such as the late Hormoz Milanian, Mohammad-Reza Bat eni, and Ali-Ashraf Sadeqi from Europe, this general tendency began to change and a strong theoretical tradition was gradually established.
