Sociolinguistics

This paper is an attempt to shed light on the effects of modernization, urbanization, monolingual educational system, and mass media as well as the process of globalization on dialect leveling among Persian dialects. In so doing, the first part of the paper elaborates on the relationship between globalization and sociolinguistics, and on the concept of standardization. Also, it discusses some factors accelerating dialect leveling among Persian dialects. The second part of the paper presents some empirical evidence for the change, based on the data collected from 3 Persian dialects, namely: Birjandi, Neyshaboori, and Yazdi. Three spoken language sample corpora from two age cohort groups in each speech community were collected. Having transcribed the data, the researchers juxtaposed the phonological, morphological, and syntactic conventions of the two groups of each speech community for further in-depth analysis. Comparing the speech samples of the two age cohorts in each corpus revealed significant movements towards standard dialect. However, the quality and quantity of the observed movements did not appear to be the same across the dialects in question.

Naming as an inseparable sign of a country’s language has attracted the attention of many linguists to formulate and test hypotheses regarding the culture and language of the people of a certain area. Iran appears like a proper destination for conducting a research focusing on naming based on several factors such as geography or chronology. The present article aims to take a specific look at the impact of political era (sociopolitical factors) in addition to dialect over naming practices. Chronological data is gathered from 5 politically significant consecutive periods. Separately, 5 districts are chosen speaking 4 different native dialects to examine the second hypothesis regarding the influence of dialect on naming. 50 most popular names were collected on the two aforementioned different bases and analysis was conducted by SPSS software. The results revealed that time with concentration on political spans did not form an influential factor except for minor fluctuations. The other hypothesis regarding the factor of dialect is rejected for male names while females do confirm a limited consistency of dialect and name choice in most of the areas.

The choice of terms of address is a typical instance representing the relational aspect of language. People address and are addressed in diverse ways in their everyday lives. Their reciprocal use of terms of address hinges upon a number of factors including power, affect, distance as well as degree of intimacy. Moreover, the use of a variety of words in different settings is a true measure indicating whether the interlocutors have crossed the borders of socially accepted and appropriate language or not. The present study focuses on the dialogues of the play entitled "Death of a Salesman" in the framework of Brown, Levinson, and Wardhaugh's theories on politeness, taboo words, and power relations. A careful  sociolinguistic examination of  the discourse features  of some samples of the play  indicated that different factors influence the exercise of power, observing politeness, and the use of taboo words by people in their everyday interactions via verbal and non-verbal language.

Translation studies essentially deals with a socio-communicatively driven and contextualized enterprise. Viewed hence, it seems that no discipline tends to provide the possibility of studying the interrelations between interlocutors to generate meaning within the interactive social context as precisely as sociolinguistics (Federici, 2018). A sociolinguistic approach to translation seems to be increasingly gaining ground, at the crossroads of Translation and Interpreting Studies (TIS) and sociology within the sociological turn (Wolf, 2010). Accordingly, the present study took a sociolinguistic approach to shed some light on The Great Gatsby (1925) and its Persian translation by Emami (2000). In so doing, an extended version of Hatim and Mason’s (1997) sociolinguistic model was employed to examine the texts in question. The source text (ST) and its target text (TT) version were investigated at both textual and extra-textual levels in light of the model’s respective sub-components. The results of this comparative study, analyzed individually for each register variable, revealed that the translator dealt rather superficially with both use-related categories of register variation like tenor and user-related aspects like idiolect. By contrast, the predominant features of literary expression were mostly retained in the translation.

This article examines the impact of gender, age, and education on the attitudes of Kurdish speakers in Mahabad towards standard Persian and the Kurdish language. Since people’s emotions towards their own or others’ languages are related to their language attitudes, this important component plays a significant role in measuring success in language planning, learning speed, language selection and use, and predicting the extinction or sustainability of a language. The study’s statistical population consisted of 80 Kurdish-Persian bilinguals in Mahabad who were randomly selected. This study is situated within the theoretical framework of sociocognitive linguistics, and the research perspective was measured through an indirect method (matched-guise test). After distributing the questionnaire and conducting the matched-guise test, the collected data were analyzed. The results of the statistical analysis showed that the variables of gender, age, and education in Mahabad had no significant impact on the attitudes of bilingual Kurdish speakers towards standard Persian and the Kurdish language. The Kurdish speakers of Mahabad exhibited numerically positive attitude towards the standard Persian language compared to Kurdish language, but no significant difference in terms of any of the mentioned variables was observed between the two languages under study.