Abstract

This study aims to examine the most important non-linguistic factors influencing the acceptance of neologisms approved by Academy of Persian Language and Literature, called Farhangestan, among Persian speakers in Iran. The theoretical basis used for this research was the diffusion of innovation model devised by Robert Leon Cooper.To get the goal, the criterion variables of adoption in the speech community were evaluated by questionnaire in three provinces.The different descriptive and inference statistics were used to determine the correlation between the mentioned variables: awareness, evaluation, knowledge and usage, in relationship to each other and to background ones: age, sex and education. The main results gained in this study show that there is a positive significant correlation between the awareness and knowledge and between evaluation and usage as well along with some other subordinate results. Above all, We came to this conclusion that Farhangestan , as the greatest language planner in Iran, can influence the awareness variable so that the proficiency and knowledge of using their neologisms by the potential adopters can be monitored. On the other hand, it can put effect on evaluation to promote frequent usage of neologisms. All these lead to diffusing the linguistic innovations, that is, the approved neologisms.