English across Borders: Exploring Register Variation in South Asian Newspaper Editorials

Abstract

This paper is a multidimensional analysis of Pakistani, Indian, and Bengali newspaper editorials, and they are also compared with British newspaper editorials. The purpose of the study is to explore lexico-grammatical patterns of change in English used in the countries separated by geopolitical divisions which remained parts of the British colony. A specialised corpus developed for this study consists of 288 text files of press editorials taken from May 2020 to May 2021 which were tagged using Biber’s tagger. Z score formula was used for the computation of dimensions score. Further, ANOVA was used to find the differences and similarities between the editorials from the selected countries. The data was also compared with British press editorials. The results indicate that Pakistani press editorials are the most informational and abstract among all the countries. Indian press editorials are the most non-narrative and the least abstract. Bengali press editorials are the most explicit and argumentative and the least informational. British press editorials are the least non-narrative, explicit, and argumentative among the selected countries. The results provide substantial evidence that the newspaper editorial registers of these countries are not only different from British press editorials but, after the partition of India, each country has developed its own norms of producing discourse also.

Keywords

• world englishes, indian english, multidimensional analysis, pakistani english, register variation