a sociolinguistic study of diglossia in ardabil city

abstract this article intends to study the phenomenon of diglossia in the formal and informal domain and also the study of age, gender, level of education and job on the application of the two languages of persian and turkish in ardabil city. the research is a descriptive-survey from the viewpoint of methodology. 400 research statistical sample people were selected out of the statistical population (ardabil city population) in form of stage sampling and based on morgan table .for data collection, the research questionnaire of parasher used and for the analysis of findings, the paired samples t test and one way anowa were employed. the comparison of the application of persian and turkish in ardabil city showed that the youth as compared with the aged, the women as compared with men, the holders of higher education as compared with those with lower higher education and the educational and administrative domains as compared with other domains have had a greater use of the persian language accordingly. 1- introduction sociolinguists are interested in studying to see how the members of each society are able to display their own identity through language and how they show a suitable response vis-à-vis delicate differences of lingual applications related to social, economic, political, religious and cultural variables of the society (spolsky, 2008). due to the different diversity among the humans in the society, language becomes a function of these diversities with specific social species. these factors include: education, job, profession domain, age, gender, social class, register, style and media (zandi, 2014:7-8). social multilingualism is a prevailing phenomenon and in the world scale, it is considered an ordinary position rather than exceptional one. in fact, in most of the countries in the world, there is more than one indigenous language is prevailing and rarely, we can find a single language country and the number of multilingual countries are much more (trudgill, 1984). 2- theoretical framework sociolinguists have evaluated the phenomenon of lingual encounter in different societies. one of the most important subjects under discussion in this research is also the issue of lingual encounter. the phenomenon of lingual encounter leads to the formation of cases such as bilingualism, multilingualism and diglossia in human societies. in the classic viewpoint taken from fergusson (1959:233), diglossia phenomenon is a specific type of standard building which the two varieties of a language live together beside each other and throughout the society and each undertakes a certain role. these two varieties are called low and high varieties. one of the most important features of diglossia is the specialization of the low and high role of the standard. high varieties are used in formal textures and low varieties are used in informal textures. fesold (1984:40-52) also terms diglossia as jumping from one style to another style. in his view, diglossia is the feature of the societies rather than individuals. individuals might be bilingual but societies are diglossia. in other words, the term diglossia, describes the social or formalized social bilingualism. however, nersesians (1995:73-80) classifies diglossia in contemporary iran into three groups: the first group is the concurrent presence of literary persian with verbal persian. in her view, the second group is the most obvious and old sample of diglossia in iran. in the article of ferguson (1972), it has been stated as an example that in fact, there is concurrent presence of standard persian with a local variety in the lingual set of individuals. many iranian still in their daily talks with their family members speak in local dialects whereas the same individuals in their own conversations with other individuals in the alleys and streets, working place etc., use the standard persian (literary or verbal). pursuing the expanded view of fishman (1967:29),nersesians believes in the presence of the diglossia phenomenon as the third type too and that is the concurrent presence of persian language with other ethnic languages. in iran, in addition to the persian speaking population, there are other ethnic groups who speak their ethnic languages in their local conversations. as a result of increase of communications and conversation of persian language into the common language of different tribes, these types of individuals are bilingual or multilingual. from the viewpoint of the situation of bilingualism, most of these efforts have passed the incomplete bilingualism and single literacy bilingualism stages and in particular have reached to the full bilingualism of the new generation. however, the bilingualism of these people even more than the condition of concurrent presence of standard persian with a variety or a local language, has found the diglossia aspect, whereas mother tongue is used in domains such as house, friendly conversations with individuals belonging to their own lingual and tribal groups. persian language is also employed in domains such as administrative and educational positions. in this article, we will deal with the study of the phenomenon of diglossia from the third type which was introduced in nersesians theory. in addition to placing the expanded theory of diglossia of fishman to regulate a part of research data, his domain analysis has also been used. fishman (1967) is the first person who presented the term of the domain of languages application and then fesold(1984:183) expanded this concept and introduced the domains of language application including family, neighborhood, friendship, business, school, working environment, public affairs and religious affairs. in this research, using the fesold viewpoint, the phenomenon of diglossia will be studied in two domains of informal (family, friendship and neighborhood) and formal domain (administrative, business and education) with the inclusion of the impact factors of age, gender, level of education and job on the application of the two languages of persian and turkish in ardabil city. 3- research methodology the research is applied from the viewpoint of objective and survey as far as method is concerned. 400 research statistical sample has been selected out of the statistical population (ardabil population) based on morgan table. the most basic instrument used in this research was questionnaire. the questionnaire has been selected based on the questionnaire of research model of parasher(1980) and of course with some amendments in it. in order to analyze the data and testing the hypotheses, also paired-samples t test and one-way anowa test have been employed in the research. 4- conclusion and discussion in summary, the results of hypotheses test showed the followings: • in ardabil, in formal positions and in encountering with persian speaking people, the persian language and in the informal positions and in encountering with turkish speaking people, the turkish language is used accordingly. • in comparing the age groups, the younger individuals use persian more than other groups. • in ardabil city, children use persian language more than other groups. • in comparison of gender groups, girls use persian language more than boys. • in a comparison on rate of education, the literate people use persian language more than illiterate people. • in the comparison of job groups, people with a greater educational jobs use persian more than other job groups. the comparison of the application of persian language and turkish language in six social domains, family, friendship, neighborhood, business, educational and administrative affairs in ardabil city showed the followings: - there is a significant difference between the application of persian language and turkish language in the respondents in each of the social domains. - in the domain of the family (informal position), the application of persian language (formal language) is less and vice versa, the application of the turkish language (mother lounge) was more than other social domains. - in the educational domain (formal position), the application of persian language was more and vice versa, the application of turkish language was less than other social domains. however, the dominant language in all other social domains of turkish language was observed. the result is in agreement with the research findings of fishman and cooper(1971), parasher (1980), fereidouni (1998), sanaei moghadam(1998) and imani (2004). comparing the averages of the application of two languages of persian and turkish by the examinees of ardabil city in eight academic groups, it is concluded that turkish is used by illiterate individuals greater and the least application of this language belongs to the level of primary school and associate in art/science degree programs. the greatest application of the persian language belongs to the individuals with the education at the level of guidance schools. the results obtained in the part 4 and 5 ( impact of educational level on language application) is in agreement with the research findings of david (2003), fereidouni (1998), sanaei moghadam (1999), bashirnejad (2000) and mashayekh(2004). the comparison of the averages obtained from the rate of application of the two languages by the respondents in ardabil city on two gender group showed that turkish is used greater by the men. as for the persian language, also the application of this language has been reported to be greater among women as compared with men. the results obtained (the impact of gender on language application) is in agreement with the results of the research by bashir nejad (2000) and imani (2004). key words: sociolinguistics, diglossia, persian language, turkish language, ardabil. references bashirnejad, h. (2000), “a study of the position and application of persian and mazandarani amid the students and teachers of intermediate schools”, m.a. thesis, tehran, allameh tabatabaei university . david, m., ibtisam, m., & kaur, s. (2003). “languge maintenace or language shift among the punjabi sikh community in malsysia”. international journal of the sociology of language, 161, 1-24. fasold, r. )1984(. “the sociolinguistics of society”. oxford: blackwell. fereiduni, j. (1998(. “a sociolinguistic study on multilingualism, a domain analysis perspective”. m.a thesis. shiraz: shiraz university. ferguson ch. (1959 /197 /2), “diglossia, word 15:325-40. fishman, j. (1964). “language maintenance and language shift as a field of inquiry”, linguistics.9.32-70. fishman j. 1967. “bilingualism with and without diglossia, diglossia with and without bilingualism”. journal of social issues23.2: 29–38. freidouni, j. (1998), “diglossia: a research on the domain analysis”, m.a. thesis, tehran, allameh tabatabaei unviersity. imani, m. (2004), “a study of the position and application of turkish and persian languages amid the speakers of qom city”, m.a. thesis, tehran, allameh tabatabaei university . kamali b. (2005) , “diglossia”, tehran, madreseh publications . lotfipour saedi (2013), “an introduction to the principles and method of translation’, tehran, center for university publications. mashayekh, t, (2003), “a study of the application of persian and guilaki”, m.a. thesis, tehran, allameh tabatabaei university. nersisanc, imilia, (1995), “diglossia in iran”, journal of linguistics, vol. two, no. 2, 73-80. ranjbar k. (2005), “a study of the situation of bilingualism amid students of high schools in kermanshah province”, m.a. thesis, tehran, allameh tabatabaei university . sanaee moghadam, z. )1999(. “a domain analysis of language use in yasuj speech community”. m. a thesis. shiraz: shiraz university. spolsky, bernard, (2008) , “sociolinguists”, a. rahimi, z. bagheri trans.), tehran, jangal. trudgill, peter )1984(. “applied sociolinguistics. new york: academic press. trudgill, p. (1997), “social linguistics”, m. tabatabaei, trans.), tehran, agah. zolfaghari, s. (1997), “bakhtiari dialect, survival or degradation: a lingual-social study in masjed suleiman city”, m.a. thesis, tehran, allameh tabatabaei university . zandi, b.(2004), “language learning”,14th edition, tehran, the organization for researching and composing university textbooks in the humanities (samt) .