A Comparative Analysis of Acronyms in Persian, English, Arabic and Turkish

Acronym formation is a major word-formation process where one or a series of letter(s) substitute one word or a longer expression. In this study, we explored the structure and frequency of acronyms in four languages, i.e. Persian, English, Arabic and Turkish. First, the websites related to Islamic Republic of Iran, United States of America, Egypt, and Turkey are selected in six topics including news, politics, sports, business, science, and culture. The pages selected randomly for each language includes six thousand (60000) words, and thereby the research corpus includes twenty four thousand (240000) words. The findings show that English is top in both the number of acronyms and their frequency, Turkish is the second followed by Persian and Arabic. The study of acronyms’ internal structure reveals that more than fifty percent of acronyms have three letters. Considering alphabet and morphological typology, it is maintained that the former plays a more significant role in making and using acronyms.