Language Variation and Attitudes: A Corpus based Sociolinguistics Study of American and British English in The Dawn

Abstract

This is a corpus based sociolinguistics study of language variation (between American and British English) and attitudinal alignment of The Dawn. The main aim of this study is to understand which language variety is more frequent in The Dawn and what this frequency reveals about The Dawn attitudinal orientation toward modernity or tradition. For data collection a specialized corpus was compiled of about 817,946 words by taking news from different sections of The Dawn newspaper online platform. Beside compiled corpus, a reference list, containing word pairs of American and British English vocabulary and spellings, was also prepared for finding frequencies in compiled corpus. To derive frequencies of American and British lexical items (vocabulary and spellings) AntConc 3.5.9 was used. In order to interpret attitudes, two sociolinguistic frameworks were used; Giles’s (2007) communication accommodation theory and Bourdieu’s (1991) concept of linguistic capital. Findings of the study suggest that although both varieties are present in The Dawn newspaper articles the frequency of British English is relatively higher. Moreover, the results also shows that The Dawn as one of the oldest and most read online newspaper of Pakistan, not only aligns with traditional and established norms but also shows a slight alignment with new innovative American linguistic trends making it more relevant and appealing for international audience.