Analysis of Human-Nature Interaction in the Persian Proverbs: An Ecolinguistics Perspective

The environmental crisis is one of the most important issues of the 21 st century. Eco linguistics explores the causes of this crisis in language. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effective linguistic factors in the eco - unfriendliness, to explore human interaction with nature, in Persian proverbs, which have high frequency in everyday conversations. The research was conducted using analytical, descriptive and library methods. In the first step, 373 proverbs, randomly and based on Morgan's table, as a suitable statistical society, from the total population of 10, 000 cases, were educed from the e-book “Ten thousand Persian proverbs and twenty five thousand equivalents”, the compilation of Dr. Ibrahim Shakour zadeh Bolouri. Then, the two concepts of anthropocentrism and anthropomorphism, based on the Eco linguistics criteria, were examined. The results of the research showed that the majority of the studied samples transmitted the anthropocentric concept, with negative affective meaning. anthropomorphism, is sometimes referred to as a way to avoid anthropocentric insight to nature, but this study showed that in Persian proverbs, human beings in the attribution of their own characteristics to nature allocate negative ones to non-human species. This insight to nature divides the world into “us” and “others” poles. The bipolar view of the world in this age may be the source of many important global issues. Part of the proverbs referred to other concepts, except for the two above- mentioned concepts, such as specialism, eco centrism, and environmental metaphors, which were used in statistical sections. Using the same pronouns for human and non-human beings, collocations of verbs such as (know, believe, etc) with non-human species and the concept of eco centrism with positive affective meaning, were observed in Persian proverbs. The use of proverbs of this kind can have a positive effect on human attitude toward nature. Language speaker should consider negative dimensions of language use. Therefore, it can be said that speakers need to identify the harmful aspects of using language and be careful in using it.