زبان پژوهی (Jun 2025)
Usage and acceptance of the academy of Persian language and literature's approved terms in linguistics publications
Abstract
Introduction Every phenomenon and innovation brings its associated terminology to the host society. Therefore, various concepts and terms, known as loanwords, emerge in the receiving society over time as a result of linguistic borrowing. Since these terms are not originally Persian, it becomes necessary to provides appropriate equivalents for them in every academic discipline. The principles and guidelines of word formation and word selection aim to identify lexical gaps in the Persian language and propose suitable equivalents by drawing from its rich lexical resources. In the meantime, linguistics journals with an impact factor, indexed in Islamic World Sciences Citation (ISC), were examined to evaluate the approved equivalents provided by universities and the extent of their use in scientific publications in the field of linguistics. The frequency of use and attention given by authors to the approved terms from the Thousand Words of Linguistics by the Academy of Persian Language and Literature (the Academy, hereafter) were also assessed. Materials and Methods This study employed a quantitative content analysis method. It investigated the frequency of use of linguistic words approved by the Academy in scientific articles published in journals indexed in the ISC database. The tendency of these publications to adopt or ignore the approved equivalents was quantitatively analyzed. The relevant terms were identified, and a list was compiled and evaluated based on the words used in the articles instead of their equivalents in the academy, along with the number of occurrences. Subsequently, expert professors in the field were interviewed using the snowball sampling method. Alternatively, a questionnaire was distributed to explore the possible reasons for not using the “Dictionary of One Thousand Words”, and the solutions suggested by the experts were documented. The statistical population of this research consisted of 10 scientific journals in the field of linguistics with an impact factor. From these 10 indexed journals, 50 articles were selected from recent issues via their official websites, resulting in a research corpus of 500 articles in the field of linguistics. To conduct the research, the specialized terms in the articles of each journal were collected. After removing duplicates, the terms were entered into Excel software. In the next step, the extracted words were matched with the one Thousand Words of Linguistics to determine the degree of compliance of the publications with the equivalents approved by the Academy. Results and conclusion It can be concluded that: Authors of linguistics articles are familiar with many of the Persian equivalents approved by the Academy. Some approved terms have yet to be adopted in practice, and authors continue to use borrowed terms despite the availability of equivalents. The use of approved terms exceeds the use of individually translated or improvised equivalents, whose usage remains minimal. Overall, linguistics journals have been successful in introducing and promoting approved terms, although a small percentage of the approved words are not included in the articles. Nonetheless, the role of scholarly publications in introducing and embedding scientific Farsi equivalents remains important.
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