Present Status of Persian Language in Modern Turkish: the Case of Personal Names

Abstract

The study reported in this paper tends to investigate the present status of Persian language in modern Turkish language through investigating the extent of familiarity of Turkish university students with Persian loan personal names as a part of Persian loan vocabulary. 50 Turkish students were selected through purposive sampling technique and the data was collected through semi-structured interview. The findings of the study were indicative of low degree of familiarity of Turkish students with Persian loan personal names and consequently Persian loan words. A qualitative analysis of data through Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) technique also revealed interesting facts about students’ both linguistic and non-linguistic knowledge about their language.