Cultural conceptualizations of haghighat/vagheyat (‘truth’/‘reality’) in Persian

This article examines the cultural conceptualizations of haghighat/vagheyat (‘truth’/‘reality’) expressions in Persian as these are fundamental concepts in life, religion, as well as culture and are used in many commonly used everyday expressions. Therefore, it is important to understand what these expressions really mean and how they compare with equivalent concepts in other languages. To that end, this study investigates haghighat/vagheyat expressions that instantiate cultural conceptualizations in Persian. This is the first attempt at employing the analytical tools of Cultural Linguistics (Sharifian 2011, 2017b) to exclusively focus on exploring such cultural conceptualizations. In order to study naturally instigated expressions, the researcher makes use of multiple sources including an open-ended questionnaire, dictionaries, online sources, and focus group interviews. The study further draws on the author’s intuition as a native speaker and analyzes have been cross-checked by a number of Persian native speakers and experts. Analysis of the data concerns the significant conceptualizations of haghighat/vagheyat expressions, indicating that haghighat/vagheyat functions as the main conceptual basis for many manifestations of truth/reality in Persian. Furthermore, the findings demonstrate that a number of sociocultural factors such as religion, history, and literature have a role in shaping the cultural conceptualizations of haghighat/vagheyat expressions in Persian.