A sociolinguistic study of Tehrani Persian

Abstract

This study investigates the social differences of the Persian language in Tehran. It is based on data collected from sixty informants: forty adults balanced equally between the two sexes and four educational groups with university, secondary, primary and no education respectively, and twenty schoolchildren from both sexes equally from families with highest and lowest education. The social parameters are related to fourteen phonological, morphological and syntactic variables. This work is presented in five chapters. Chapter One gives general background information on the city of Tehran and its social structure. It also discusses the history of the Persian language from early days and gives some comments on the writing system. Chapter Two is about the research in Tehran. It gives the characteristics of the sample and the method of interview. It also gives a short introduction on sociolinguistic variables as well as the theoretical issues. In Chapter Three the co-variation of the linguistic variables and the social factors, such as class, sex and age, as well as style, are discussed and shown by means of figures and tables. Chapter Four is about the politeness system in Persian. Here the pronouns and verbs and their variations are given. The combination of these variations and their application in terms of power and solidarity are also discussed. Chapter Five gives an overview of the results of the analysis. It discusses the various theoretical issues such as transition probabilities, lexical diffusion, and the sociolinguistic structure of Tehran in detail, and draws the final conclusion