AMERICANIZATION OF PAKISTANI ENGLISH: A MULTIDIMENSIONAL ANALYSIS OF PAKISTANI, BRITISH AND AMERICAN NEWSPAPER EDITORIALS

Abstract

Due to globalization, journalistic English in Pakistan has more inclination towards American standard. There is a switch from British English to American English in Pakistani newspaper and the purpose of this study is to demonstrate an exceptional corpus of journalistic trend of using American English in Pakistani English newspaper and scrutinizing in which aspects the American English is more standardized than British English among the English language learners in Pakistan. The objective of this study is to illustrate the influence of American standard variety over the British standard on the Pakistani English language learners through newspaper editorials. According to Kirkpatrick (2007), American standard English has a prestigious and brawny preference of English vocabulary. The use of American standard in Pakistani newspapers shows that Pakistani English speakers incline more towards American English than British English especially at lexical and grammatical level. Biber’s (1998) Multidimensional analysis tagger (MAT) is employed on a corpus of 300 editorials from each newspaper (from 1^st March to 30^th February 2025) of Dawn, The Nation, Express Tribune and The News International from Pakistani news press; The Guardian, The London Times, The Courier and The Daily Telegraph from British press reportage and THE Washington Post, The New York Times, The Boston Globe and The Wall Street Journal from American news press. MAT is a tool for functional analysis of English text at multidimensional level. The finding of this study shows a remarkable difference at lexical and grammatical level reflecting an inclination of Pakistani English speakers towards American standard in Pakistani newspaper editorials over the British English.  This study has a significant implication for educators and English language learners, accentuating the significance of American standard variety in Pakistani journalistic writings. In previous studies, Pakistani English standard is studied at distinct levels of variation between Pakistani and British standard. But the linguistically, Americanization is an emerging phenomenon in Pakistani newspapers which is proposed to inspect the nuances of this linguistic variation in World Englishes and purposively to fill this research gap. The findings confirm the significance of similar corpora for comparative evaluation of cross-linguistic varieties of inner and outer circle varieties and the necessity of MD analysis for understanding L2 written register.