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The “Persian Gulf”, as a very important geopolitical region known as global heartland, is the third great gulf of the world. There have been some controversies over the name of this region in recent few decades, and recently some Persian Gulf Arab states or sometimes American and European institutes have tried to coin the fake name of “Arab Gulf” instead. In this paper, after reviewing the literature and historical and international documents, we study the naming strategy of international media toward the name of this important geographical entity. We compare the frequency, genre and content of the articles and news in which four referring expressions of “Arabic/Arab/Arabian/Persian Gulf” have been used within the Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) framework. The data are gathered from Time magazine archive (1923-2008) and Contemporary Corpus of American English (COCA) (1990-2012). The findings of this article show that, comparing with other terms, the usage of the term “Persian Gulf” is considerably and undeniably more than the other three terms in a way that in Time magazine archive, there are 969 and in COCA corpus, 5003 cases of “Persian Gulf” usages while this number is around a hundred for all of the three coined words. The results further shows that while Persian Gulf is widely used context freely as default name, “Arab Gulf” term is mostly used in economic context, especially in those news and articles, which are about the “oil”.

Keywords: critical discourse analysis, Corpus-based analysis, Persian Gulf, Naming strategies, Media Texts

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