DISCURSIVE CONSTRUCTIONS OF BELONGING: LINGUISTIC IDENTITY FORMATION AMONG RELIGIOUS MINORITIES IN PAKISTANI DAILY DISCOURSE

Abstract

This study explores the language practices of religious minorities in Pakistan and how they are used to create a sense of belonging or exclusion within the broader society. Pakistan is, in fact, a Muslim-majority state, and religious minorities such as Christians, Hindus, Ahmadis and Sikhs comprise a small but historic portion of Pakistan's population. Previous research on the topic has focused on analysing textbooks, media representations, or the legal and constitutional position of minority citizens, and few studies have examined the actual language practices of minorities in the field or inquired into how minority citizens feel about their sense of belonging. To fill that gap, this study employed a quantitative approach with a cross-sectional survey design. 380 respondents were selected from Christian, Hindu, Ahmadi, Sikh and Parsi communities across different localities in Punjab, Sindh and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and a structured questionnaire was used to collect information. The questionnaire was designed with four constructs: home language use, public language accommodation, discursive othering experience and sense of national belonging, and consisted of twenty-four (24) items on a 5-point scale. The guiding theory was Social Identity Theory (Henri Tajfel and John Turner), which provides a clear explanation of the processes by which group members evaluate their own group and outgroups to maintain a stable and positive social identity. Data were analysed using descriptive statistics, reliability analysis, one-way analysis of variance, Pearson correlation and multiple linear regression. The results indicate that public language accommodation and home language use are positively related to belonging, whilst the strongest negative relationship with belonging is with discursive othering experience. Ahmadi respondents had the lowest belonging scores of all those included in the sample, whilst Hindu and Christian respondents had comparatively higher scores. The results of the regression analyses support the above findings and demonstrate that discursive othering experience is the most powerful single determinant of national belonging, followed by public language accommodation, home language use, education, and age. These findings indicate that such seemingly simple, everyday language practices have tangible and significant impacts on religious minority perspectives on belonging to the nation, and that more inclusive and shared language in everyday interactions across schools, media and public institutions can help foster greater belonging.