This chapter reports on a conversation analytical study of the sequential organisation of telephone openings in Iran. The focus of this research is on:(a) how recognition and identifi cation are accomplished by parties in the fi rst turns at talk, and (b) how how-are-you inquiries are performed by them. The analysis of telephone calls in Iran suggests that, similar to the sequential organisation in American telephone openings, Iranians orient to identifi cation and recognition and exchange how-are-yous in telephone conversation openings. However, there are some cross-cultural diff erences contingent on formality and informality in Persian culture. Specifi cally, for Iranians, there seems to be a close connection between the relative social status of the speakers and the use of linguistic forms in identifi cation/recognition, the exchange of greeting tokens, and how-are-you sequences. That is, participants display attempts to raise the politeness level by using more formal/polite linguistic variations in identifi cation/recognition, greetings, and how-are-you sequences. Further, my analysis suggests that the length of the how-are-you sequences is related to the nature of the telephone call: the how-are-you sequences are comparatively longer when the telephone call is for social purposes.

The data corpus for this study consists of 87 telephone calls in Persian that were audio-taped in Iran. Seven persons were asked to audio-tape telephone calls initiated by themselves from their home as well as telephone calls they received at home. They were middle-class Iranians ranging in age between 28 and 60 years old. The telephone calls include conversations between relatives, friends, and acquaintances. All telephone call openings of the collected data were transcribed according to the transcription notation developed by Gail Jeff erson (1984) for conversation analysis (see appendix).