Kourosh Abbaspour (UK)

I graduated with a BA First Class in Arabic and Persian from SOAS, University of London in 2021. As a student of linguistics, I know where I want to get, and while I know only roughly how to get there, I am relying on myself, sprinkled with optimism and external encouragement, to find my way. Love is a complex word, but I have some sort of love for languages, and I am learning new things about them all the time. I also love explaining, as best I can, how they work. I dream of expounding the increasingly dominant colloquial variety of Iranian Persian and formulating some sort of rigid and detailed textbook to give learners of Persian greater access to a language which is usually only taught in its literary form (both modern and medieval). I struggled (and continue to struggle) to grasp this very lively and ever growing language, and hope that my desire to conquer it might be shared by other students.

 

As for research, I am open to ideas, and waiting for a muse to give me a boon as to what to say and what to do. Of course, that muse likely lies in a lecture or the pages of some book somewhere, so I will naturally have to devote a lot of time to consuming information. Fortunately, I received this amazing scholarship, and now have the time to read more books and learn more about languages and how they work. One thought that recently transited my mind, for example, was the mirroring effect and its manifestation in language, and what implications that might have for our inexplicit perceptions of other people. Having said that, I do not want to box myself in, as my interests seem to expand and contract daily. I wish to say “thank you very much” to the Ertegun scholarship for having me.