Iranian Students’ Attitudes Towards English Loanwords in Persian with a Focus on Gender Differences

The English language has affected nearly every language community in the world. Persian is no exception as many English words have been borrowed in Persian. This study was non-experimental quantitative-descriptive research employing an approach to examine the Iranian postgraduate students’ attitudes towards English lexical borrowings and if there was a difference between the attitude of male Persian speakers and female Persian speakers. To fulfill the purpose of this study, two sets of questionnaires were distributed among ۶۰ Iranian students majoring in law and business through snowball sampling. The quantitative data were collected by means of two sets of questionnaires and entered into SPSS and the frequencies, percentages, and mean of the individual items were calculated and analyzed. The data analyses showed evidence of positive attitudes of students towards English loanwords. The results also indicated that the growth of social media has a great effect in the use of English words which seems to be kept across both genders. All in all, it was concluded that attitudes towards English loanwords in Persian were positive, yet there was not a statistically significant correlation between Iranian female students and Iranian male participants. The study contributes to our understanding of the nature of lexical borrowings from English into Persian. Therefore, an implication of this study is that English loanwords must only be used appropriately and when necessary because misuses of them will result in weakening and deterioration of the Persian language.

Keywords:

attitudes , Borrowing , Loanwords , Persian speakers