EMPLOYING LANGUAGE TO DETERMINE POLITICAL THOUGHT: A LINGUISTIC RELATIVITY ANALYSIS OF PAKISTAN'S 2024 ELECTION SLOGANS

Abstract

This paper examines how language contributes to political thought in Pakistan’s 2024 election campaign, using the framework of Linguistic Relativism. It is therefore the intention of the study to find out how and to what extent certain aspects of political language in the election slogans including the lexical density and complexity, use of metaphor, syntactical features and repetition bear their impact on the perception and ideology development among the voters. In the following research, both quantitative and qualitative methods are adopted which are content analysis of five leading political party slogans and an opinion-based structured questionnaires using random sampling technique to capture a wide range of voters’ emotions and cognitions on slogans. Defining various linguistic activities, the study shows that imperative and parallel structures, possessive language, and metaphorical framing of slogans are among the effective ways to build strong ideological messages. Consequently, the analysis indicates that these elaborated linguistic features are not only referential but also constitutive of the electorate’s experience and understanding of the Party’s identity, the nature of its leadership, and policy agenda. The consideration reaches political analysts and sociolinguists, as well as media theorists concerned with language-related contingencies that impact higher mental processes in constructing shared beliefs in diverse social settings.