A Content Analysis of Themes in Persian Curses

Undoubtedly, traces of culture and spirit of people of any language community can be found in their language. With the careful analysis of each language, one can understand the culture it reflects. Pishghadam (2012) introduces the Persian concept of Zabahang that refer to the interrelationship between language and culture. He claims that each concept like the curse in a language is one manifestation of the culture that it represents and believes that cross-cultural and cross-linguistic research can use the concept of Zabahang to explore the representation of culture through language. Curse, as part of the vernacular/culture of society, is one of the most important speech acts in any language. This has been rarely noticed by researchers and it is necessary to provide a systematic classification of the themes of curses. In this study, the researchers intended to answer the following questions: What is the distribution of types of curses? Which types of curses have more tokens? And what is the connection between the types of curses and the culture of the society?