Critical Discourse Analysis of Pakistani Billboards: A Study of Language Variations in Perspectives of World Englishes

Abstract

Pakistani English variety used on the signboards in Pakistani markets has syntactic, phonological and lexical variations and this study explores those variations that deviate Pakistani English variety from the standard Englishes. We have used Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) theoretical framework with a Multimodal Discourse Analysis (MDA) approach by Kress and Leeuwen (2019). The study first analyses the language used in the selected billboards and then moves to the analysis of images attached with those billboards. We have found that Pakistani advertisers on the billboards use a huge number of English words written in Urdu font-style that presents a new variety of English. Moreover, the code-switching is common in such a developing variety. The American variety was dominant in Pakistani English variety in terms of phonological patterns. The findings have also explored that the billboards contain religious words as brand names because such words are more common in the society and they attract the public emotionally. Moreover, the specific product images were placed to create link between text and product. The current study may assist the researchers to apply similar modal to enrich findings that are presented in Critical Discourse Studies.