Society in the mirror of language; a study of the rate of violence, politeness, sadness and happiness in the Persian-speaking community

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Authors

1 Linguistics Department, Faculty of Literature and humanities, Bu-Ali Sina University, Hamedan, Iran

2 BuAli SIna University

Abstract

Language is a social phenomenon. What happens in society is reflected in language. For this reason, the social study of language can reveal facts about the language community. If a society is violent, rude or sad, it manifests itself in language. With this assumption, the present paper examines the rate of the three social characteristics of violence, politeness, and sadness and happiness and its reflection in the Persian language in the last five decades. The two main questions of the research are: Has the Persian-speaking community become more violent, rude and sad in the last five decades? Is there a connection between important political and social events and the rate of these changes? To answer these questions, a corpus from the past five decades were analysed, including movies, newspapers, stories, speeches by politicians, and songs. The corpus was divided into five decades, in each decade one or more important political and social events took place in the country: the fifties (revolution), the sixties (war), the seventies (construction and reformations), the eighties (kindness and election issues), and the nineties (moderation and sanctions). In this corpus, we have sought to find, analyse and determine the frequency of language tools that show the desired characteristics such as metaphors, adjectives, forms of address, and taboo words. This study shows that generally the Persian-speaking community has become more violent, rude, and sad at least in the last two decades. There is also a clear relationship between the main socio-political events in each decade and the rate of increase or decrease of these characteristics.

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References

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Language and Linguistics
Volume 17, Issue 34
January 2023
Pages 87-112

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