One Concept, Many Names! Analyzing a Serious Challenge Lying Ahead of the Formation of Academic Persian Vocabulary

Abstract

Academic language or language for academic purposes in its both forms, namely language for general academic purposes and language for specific academic purposes, addresses various common language skills among which the importance of academic vocabulary or terminology is now widely accepted. The occurrence of such vocabulary, created and used to communicate ideas about their specialized worlds, is a common and important feature of academic or specialized texts in any subject field. Despite such importance, reviewing the status of vocabulary in Academic Persian or Persian for Academic Purposes (PAP), as a newly-grown discipline, reveals that this area suffers from a serious challenge namely lack of consistency in academic vocabulary selection and use. Undoubtedly, the use of various designations or equivalents for an imported concept is clear evidence to the claim. Thus, in this research, at first the significant position of academic vocabulary in academic language in general and academic Persian in specific as well as the Academy of Persian Language and Literature (APLL)’s activities especially in word selection and terminology, as its central concern, are introduced. Then, through providing notable examples taken from the disciplines of linguistics and literature, the problem of using various designations for one concept and its consequences in Academic Persian language are dealt with. In doing so, through reviewing and comparing at least twenty books and dictionaries in the fields of linguistics and literature written, developed or translated by Iranian researchers, it was found that such texts were faced with glaring inconsistency in selection and use of Persian equivalents for the related academic concepts. To approve this claim, thirty terms, chosen randomly from the above-mentioned texts, are provided as a sample and then analyzed. Reviewing the haphazard use of these terms in such texts revealed that even the equivalents proposed by the APLL, as the legitimate authority of word selection for the Academic Persian, could not have terminated this inconsistency which has turned into a source of misunderstanding among specialists and users.