Aspects of Intercultural Communication: The Use of English by Iranians

This paper aims to investigate how sociolinguistic transfers may lead to a breakdown in intercultural communication. The main argument is not only do they cause communication failures but also they help developing cultural stereotypes. The investigation will be carried out by looking at “terms of address”, “modes of request”, and “religious terms” in Persian and English in a contrastive fashion. The analysis of data, based on an ethnographical and introspective method, illustrates that the covert sociolinguistic transfer plays a more powerful role to perpetuate misunderstanding than overt sociolinguistic transfer.