Multilingualism and Its Influence in Tafsir al-Mizan (Linguistic Research)

“Multilingualism” is a natural, humanly, and historical phenomenon, because human being is not needless of the reciprocal understanding resulting from language. The present study investigates the phenomenon of multilingualism and its effect on writing, the extent it influenced Allame tabataba’i, the role it played in his writing the Al-Mizan and the effect of this phenomenon on the readers of Al-Mizan. The concept of “multilingualism” is different from “ diglossia” and “bilingualism”. Diglossia is the interference of more than one accent in one language, while bilingualism is the interference of two languages. An individual is inherently capable of acquiring language during childhood. Since Allame didn’t learn Arabic in his childhood, so by the time he learnt this language, he didn’t have that inherent ability so that in writing Al-Mizan he faced linguistic challenges. Those challenges were at three levels: morphological, syntactic, and lexical, meaning, the Arabic text of Al-Mizan was influenced by the Persian and the Turkish language under these three linguistic levels. After analysis, it was evident that this challenges cause linguistic complexities. Sometimes these complexities are to the point that the reader doesn’t understand the sentence, or he/she understands the sentences in a way that was not intended by the author. Adopting analytical and descriptive method, the researcher studies the issue of multilingualism, the mindset of the Al-Mizan author and the reason of the linguistic challenges. Therefore, this research doesn’t study the difficulties an Arab encounter in such endeavor, but the influence of first language on the second language.