A Contrastive Analysis of Season’s Greetings across Three ‎Languages: The Case of English, Farsi, and Spanish

This study is an attempt to investigate the themes that three different countries with three different cultures employ to wish happy New Year. In doing so, 657 messages (English, Farsi, and English) were content analyzed in terms of their recurring themes. Results of the analysis indicated that while the underlying concept is wishing a happy new year, the range of themes to manifest this concept are very diverse. While English language appears to have only six more recurring themes to greet the New Year, Farsi seems to include ten more frequent themes to perform this function. Spanish speaking nations also do so through six major themes. While Farsi themes were also evident in the English language, English language did not possess any exclusive theme. Spanish also had a theme not available in English and Farsi corpora. The study comes to an end with some more research strands for further exploration of this rather underexplored topic.