DIGITAL NATIONALISM AND IDEOLOGICAL POLARIZATION: A CORPUS ASSISTED CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF TWITTER/X POLITICAL NARRATIVE IN SOUTH ASIA

Abstract

The present study explores the relationship between the digital nationalism and ideology polarization in the political discourse of X in South Asia using Corpus-Assisted Critical Discourse Analysis (CACDA). Social media networks are increasingly important political communication, ideological contestation, and nationalist mobilization arenas in recent years. Twitter/X has become a digital space in Pakistan, India and Bangladesh where the political, media, influencers and citizens are developing opposing narratives and national identities. Although the importance of the Internet in political communication is well recognized and its relevance to the study of nationalism and polarization has been highlighted, there is still little research that has explored the linguistic production of nationalism and polarization in online discourse from an integrated approach to corpus linguistic and critical discourse analytical research. This study uses a mixed method which is a combination of quantitative corpus technique and qualitative Critical Discourse Analysis. A corpus of political and political related tweets/posts  built from user selected hashtags, political campaigns and major socio political events in South Asian region. Dominant lexical and ideological trends  determined through the use of corpus tools like frequency analysis, collocation patterns and concordance analysis. The linguistic patterns then be analyzed from a socio-cognitive perspective of Van Dijk and from a three-dimensional CDA perspective of Fairclough, with a view to understanding how the political narratives create in-group solidarity, delegitimize ideology, and strengthen digital polarization. The study claims that the political debates on Twitter/X in South Asia foster a ‘nationalism of emotions’ driven by binarisms and populist appeals, the use of religious signs and symbols, and a tendency to represent the ‘other’ in an antagonistic fashion. The results are expected to reveal digital nationalism as more than a feeling of patriotism but as a discursive process that normalizes, amplifies and disseminates ideology in networked digital spaces.