While much has been written about twentieth-century Iranian nationalism and the politics of ‘purifying’—as the nationalists saw it—Persian of its Arabic loanwords, less attention has been paid to the sexual dimensions of this linguistic nationalism. Afsaneh Najmabadi, Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi, and other scholars have demonstrated that Iranian nationalism is gendered and begins to depict the nation as a woman around the turn of the twentieth century. But what of Iran’s Other—how has Arabic been gendered in the Iranian nationalist imagination? Furthermore, what kind of erotic attachments to language are engendered by these depictions? This paper offers insight into those questions through a close reading of two poems that circulated in 1940s Tehran. One is a qet‘eh published by Mohammad-Taqi Bahar (1886-1951), and the other a tasnif by Parviz Khatibi (1922-1993). The latter was performed in theaters on Lalehzar street by Khatibi, and recorded for radio by Morteza Ahmadi (1924-2014). Both poems revolve around Arabic—in particular, its distinctive pharyngeal consonants which are generally lost in Persian pronunciation—as a marker of male and foreign sexual deviancy against which a feminized Iranian nation should be protected. I argue that these poems demonstrate an erotic attachment to language that goes beyond the image of the nation as a female beloved: the very phonology of Persian becomes the object of desire, and the insertion of Arabic pronunciation which both poems rely on is meant to evoke the nationalist zeal of its Iranian audience. The feminization of Persian and masculinization of Arabic offer an interesting departure from the way nationalists have gendered language elsewhere in the Middle East (for example, in early Zionist contexts, the ‘national language,’ Hebrew, is masculinized in opposition to the feminized Yiddish, as Naomi Seidman argues). Finally, this paper also considers the contribution this eroticized discourse of language makes to establishing the Tehrani dialect as the Iranian national standard, against other Persian dialects, some of which (eg. Dezfuli, Shushtari, and others) containing the very Arabic pharyngeal sounds mocked in Bahar and Khatibi’s satirical poems.