False Friends-Words in Persian and Māzandarāni

This study contrasts Māzandarāni and Persian. Persian is now increasingly influencing Māzandarāni, so that a majority of Māzandarān province is now bilingual. False-friend words refer to words in two languages seemingly similar but denoting different meanings. According to Lee, Semantic false friends, https://unravellingmag.com/articles/semantic-false-friends/ (2016), we would come across false friends when a language borrows a word from another language or when a word later experiences a shift or addition in meaning; consequently a speaker of one of the languages might face an instance of a false friend when learning the borrowed word. Since Persian and Māzandarāni are two geographical variants of Classical Persian, this is a frequently encountered situation. The false friend-words of Persian and Māzandarāni are selected from dictionaries of Tabari vocabularies while the correctness of these words has been verified by some Persian dictionaries. To produce the desired results, after a brief introduction of these languages, the present chapter categorizes around 200 false-friend words in Māzandarāni and Persian into eight conceptual categories and analyses the different phonological and semantic aspects of this division. Consulting a good glossary of false-friend words in these two Languages is the main objective. The discussion employs extensive and detailed examples to illustrate the differences between these groups. As these are words that culturally and ecologically nurtured into their current cognizance certainly the analyses highlight a cultural linguistics conceptualization that speaks to variety thereby.