Persian Speakers’ Perception of Non- Standard Persian Varieties from a Perceptual Dialectology Perspective

This research aims at studying the attitudes of Persian speakers of Karaj to non - standard varieties of Persian by measuring both their success in identifying five regional varieties of Persian including Abadani, Afghani, Shirazi, Kermani and Yazdi and analyzing their positive or negative attitudes towards them. Learning about the attitudes of members of a language community towards linguistic diversity is a key factor in the success of language planning. The independent variables are age, sex and bilinguality. The research tool is a researcher-made questionnaire which comprises personal information, accent identification and language attitudes. The informants are 218 students in the age- rang of 18 to 50 whose main language of communication was Persian. In the selection of universities, the convenience sampling and in the selection of the informants random sampling has been used. The results showed that the informants were more successful in identifying Yazdi variety. The informants used positive and negative traits to describe the varieties and the percentage of negative traits was higher for Afghani variety. The lowest percentage of attitude components is related to Afghani and Kermani varieties. Age and sex variables had a significant effect on Persian speakers’ attitude towards the varieties under study.