SHAPING ADVICE THROUGH ENGLISH: A CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF AUNTIE AGNI’S ADVICE COLUMN IN DAWN NEWSPAPER

Abstract

Advice columns constitute influential sites of everyday meaning-making, where language mediates personal guidance, social norms, and cultural values. This study offers a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) of Auntie Agni, a popular advice column published in Dawn, Pakistan’s leading English-language newspaper, to examine how advice is linguistically and ideologically constructed through Pakistani English. Drawing on Fairclough’s three-dimensional model of CDA, the study analyses 52 advice columns published between January and December 2025 at the levels of text, discursive practice, and sociocultural practice. At the textual level, the findings show that advice is framed through direct address, soft modality, evaluative reassurance, metaphor, humour, and culturally embedded idioms, constructing an empathetic and non-authoritarian advisory voice. Discursively, the column blends therapeutic, religious, moral, and educational discourses, positioning the columnist as an expert–friend who negotiates authority through intimacy rather than prescription. At the sociocultural level, the analysis reveals how the column engages with key Pakistani social concerns, including family authority, gender norms, marriage, mental health stigma, education pressure, and class anxiety, not by rejecting them outright but by subtly reinterpreting and renegotiating them. Situated within the framework of World Englishes (2009), the study demonstrates that Pakistani English in Auntie Agni functions as a localized, culturally resonant variety used for emotional counselling and moral guidance rather than as a marker of elite or Western identity. By foregrounding advice discourse as a neglected media genre in Pakistani English scholarship, this study fills an important empirical and theoretical gap, showing how newspaper advice columns operate as sites of ideological, emotional, and cultural pedagogy in contemporary Pakistan.