Cultural-Geographical Lexicon: Linguistic Relativity or Word Discourse?

The purpose of this study was to investigate the difference between cultural-geographical words in the dialects of different regions of Iran. The question is whether the Whorfian theory of linguistic relativity is confirmed by what exists in the scope of these terms and consequently, the relationship between language and thinking process in these dialects must be considered from a cognitive perspective or this difference and the subject of "cultural-geographical vocabulary" in general should be analyzed from the opposite side, i.e. the influence of culture and society on language. This research was conducted by the descriptive-analytical method in several stages and through two questionnaires (with 110 and 148 participants, respectively). Considering all the components involved, the data were analyzed qualitatively and quantitatively. The results show that geographical-cultural words are related to the socio-economic conditions of cultures rather than to the cognition and way of thinking of people of different regions. These words do not reflect cognitive distinctions rather, they are a mirror of the geography, climate, ecosystem, occupations geographical-cultural customs of their speakers and as part of a larger discourse, they carry and reflect many details and unspoken words from the geography and climate of the place of production. Thus, these lexical differences go back to the differences in the culture and ecology of the speakers and it is not in the realm of linguistic relativity and cognition. The findings emphasize the narrow border between these two types of lexical differences, which is usually ignored in cognitive-discourse research.