Abstract:
This study strives to investigate the importance of ‘education’ and ‘gender’, as two major sociolinguistic variables, in accepting or rejecting the words coined by the Iranian Academy of Persian Language and Literature (APLL). A total of 500 students from state universities in Tehran were chosen as subjects and provided with a questionnaire consisting of 50 APLL equivalents. The respondents’ acceptance of the first 25 words correlated with the extent to which these words are used in newspapers and magazines; however, the second 25 equivalents were treated differently. Close to half of the Undergraduates and Masters and only a little more than half of the PhD students accepted the equivalents. The results showed no significant relationship between education and the acceptance and rejection of the APLL words; however, there was a significant relationship between respondents’ parents’ education and the acceptance and rejection of the APLL words. Although, males tended to be slightly more accepting than females who were split 50:50, there was no significant relationship between gender and the acceptance and rejection of the APLL words. The respondents preferred words which had only a single equivalent.
Machine summary:
However, to date no study seems to have critically discussed the criteria considered by the Iranian Persian speech community for accepting or rejecting the lexical items introduced by the Academy of Persian Language and Literature.
The former is of the view that linguists should be included in discussions on the capability of the Persian language, while the latter explain that carelessness and extremes in word-selection [by both officials involved in the APLL and individual experts] are the reasons behind the non-acceptance of words by the general public.
It follows that we should be studying their judgments and, accordingly, the present study has used a questionnaire as an attempt to obtain helpful feedback from the Iranian speech community as to what words are accepted or rejected and the reasons for this.
In order to investigate the views of the subjects in terms of acceptance and/or rejection of the APLL general words, the researchers provided a questionnaire composed of 50 words (25 with the highest frequency and 25 others with zero frequency).
3. Results The preliminary analysis of the data showed that in terms of gender, the males outnumber the females (55% and 45%, respectively), with 60% being BA, 30% MA and 10% Ph. D from different fields of study including Humanities, Engineering, Science and Language (see Table 1 & 2 below).
It should be pointed out that in terms of acceptance and rejection of the new APLL equivalents there seems to be no difference between the perceptions of the gender; however, some sociolinguists (Coates, 1986; Gal, 1994; Lakoff, 2004) claim that men and women differ significantly in their communicative style.