On the search of Persian in contemporary English and German: A selection of loanwords with regard to the educational language policy in German state schools
Volume 36, Issue 2, November 2023, Pages 173-196
https://doi.org/10.22034/spektrum.2023.194647
Mehrdad Saeedi
Abstract This article is of course not about practicing and spreading patriotic language ideology in the name of etymology, but rather about problematizing such a language ideology alongside linguistic discrimination as a variety of the Eurocentric, Islamophobic ideology in the school context of the multiculturalmultilingual state of Berlin. The school context here only refers to the pedagogically and foreign language linguistically questionable language attitudes and practices of some teachers and educators and not the official language and multilingualism policy of the state government or Senate Department for Education, Youth and Family as a whole. In other words, this text, which essentially consists of a criteria-based selection of 60 English and German loanwords of Persian origin, wants to invite German-speaking readers and especially the educators among them while using the everyday, expanded and standard vocabulary to look at their own language and the English language as a global lingua franca through a different, more relative
lens, namely as languages with more lexical influence from oriental languages of the old neighboring region of Europe, the Islamic world, than previously assumed.
