Lady Presidents? Sociolinguistics and Iranian Constitution

Section 115 of Iranian constitution reads: "The president should be among the political, religious 'rejal' …". The word 'rejal' taken from Arabic language means 'men'. Some Iranian politicians believe that the word has the same meaning in Persian, therefore, women cannot lead the country as presidents; while, others argue that 'rejal' can now refer to both sexes, therefore women can be elected as presidents. This, study tackles the issue from a sociolinguistic perspective. To do this, we need to find if the word 'rejal' is now a Persian word borrowed from Arabic, or, it is an Arabic word to which Persian speakers switch. About eleven hours of sociolinguistic interviews were conducted with 10 Persian speakers and all nouns (Arabic or Persian) were extracted from the data and later subjected to analyses to describe the linguistic behavior of each category in its own context. Then the behavior of nouns in each context is compared to that of the other contexts. Our findings show that Arabic origin nouns are found to be behaving like Persian nouns, they have, therefore, been borrowed into Persian and have Persian connotations and functions. Evidence is, therefore, presented to the 'Persianness' of 'rejal', shedding scientific light on a political problem.

Lady Presidents? Sociolinguistics and Iranian Constitution Keywords:

Borrowing , Code-switching , Persian , reja:l , وامگیری , کدگردانی , فارسی , رجال