A Sociolinguistic Study of Graffiti in Tehran

Graffiti as one of the social phenomenon has a very long record. However, the graffiti in modern civilization has been put forth as a media. In this article, efforts have been made to study the graffiti from the linguistic perspective. In this research, 2929 graffiti from different districts in the north, south, east, west and center of Tehran have been registered and then extracted and analyzed. After reviewing a set of graffiti, it was specified: The whole set of graffiti in Tehran city include lingual writings (92.76%) and visual writings (7.23%). Comparing the social position of graffiti artists, the whole lingual graffiti of Tehran city includes formal writings emerging from the official discourse (9.72%) and the informal writings emerging from unofficial discourse (90.27%). Comparing the formal and informal writing motifs, it was learned that the informal writing motifs were more than educational, political and religious motifs. Where the names of individuals in informal writings with 25.08% were the greatest motifs. As for the male names in use, it can be said that the male names were much more than female names. The religious motifs with (2.73%) were the least graffiti. In comparison with the writing system (script), Persian script with 79.16% as compared with English script with 20.83% includes the whole lingual graffiti of Tehran city. Graffiti in English tend to motifs related to self expression (names, interests and hates). The social motifs including economic propagations, information dissemination, educational and religious ones have a slight share in writing in English script. In fact, the graffiti writters have employed English script as a code of expression of oneself in a self-oriented expression. Oppositely, Persian script has been used to convey social message.