The Impact of Gender and Age on the Use of Animal Names as Forms of Address and Description in English and Persian

Abstract

Animal metaphors are used to describe various characteristics of human beings in different languages. This article aims to investigate whether gender and age have a significant impact on the use of animal names in Persian and English. Therefore, A questionnaire previously used by Halupka-Resetaa and Radic's study (2003) and Szamosfalvi's study (2011) with some slight changes contaminating 43 animal names were given to the participants. The questionnaire was distributed among 120 Persian and English monolingual participants and a structured interview was employed to gain a better understanding of the answers provided by participants. In this interview participants were asked to provide an example for the situation in which they used a certain animal name. Animal names which at least 40% of the participants had mentioned in the structured interview were primarily considered and analyzed. There were only 11 animal names which were commonly used by English and Persian participants. The results from the gender cross-tabulation in chi-square test indicated that 48% of English participants and 47% of the Persian participants who used the mentioned animal names were men and 52% of English participants and 53% of the Persian participants who used the mentioned animal names were women.  Also age cross-tabulation in chi-square test indicated that 64% of English participants and 63% of the Persian participants who used the mentioned animal names were under the age of 30 and 36% of English participants and 37% of the Persian participants who used the mentioned animal names were above the age of 30. Thus, it was found that there are no significant differences between the Persian and English participants in using animal names in terms of the participants' gender and age. The findings of the present study are of importance since teachers or syllabus designers can use different types of metaphors including animal metaphors in their contexts and it can be of help to translators and error analysts since the cultural similarities and differences are their main area of focus.