A Pathological View on Replacing Loanwords in Textbooks with the Proposed Terms by Academy of Persian Language and Literature

Due to bilingualism and interaction among languages, all languages experience changes at different levels as a result of these language contacts. One of these levels is lexicon which has become a source of concern for policy makers and language planners more than the other language levels. Therefore, this qualitative study was conducted to investigate the plan of replacing the loanwords in high school textbooks with the proposed terms by Academy of Persian Language and Literature. To this end, in a structured interview, 126 participants, including high school students, teachers, college students, and linguists were required to evaluate the necessity of implementing the plan, justify its success or failure, and propose suggestions for increasing its efficiency. The results of this study indicated that the vast majority of participants (97%) did not agree with the implementation of the plan. The reasons they gave for their disagreement were confusion in the audience, lack of coordination in the use of proposed terms in educational settings, and the international nature of technical terms. They also deemed the plan unsuccessful justifying that the audience would not use the new terms in their daily communication and that scientific terms are international in nature. Based on the findings, it can be concluded that the Academy of Persian Language and Literature, while diligently trying to preserve the structure of Persian as the language of science, should reformulate the quality and quantity of the plan through modifying the principles and criteria for selecting technical terms.