English across Borders: Exploring Register Variation in South Asian Newspaper Editorials

Abstract

This  paper  is  a  multidimensional  analysis  of  Pakistani,  Indian,  and  Bengali newspaper editorials, and they are also compared with British newspaper editorials. The purpose of the study is to explore lexico-grammatical patterns of change in English used in the countries separated by geopolitical divisions which remained parts of the British colony. A specialised corpus developed for this study consists of 288 text files of press editorials taken from May 2020 to May 2021 which were tagged using Biber’s tagger. Z score formula was used for the computation of dimensions score. Further, ANOVA was used to find the differences and similarities between the editorials from the selected countries. The data was also compared with British press  editorials.  The  results  indicate  that  Pakistani  press  editorials  are  the  most informational and abstract among all the countries. Indian press editorials are the most  non-narrative  and  the  least  abstract.  Bengali  press  editorials  are  the  most explicit and argumentative and the least informational. British press editorials are the least non-narrative, explicit, and argumentative among the selected countries. The results provide substantial evidence that the newspaper editorial registers of these  countries  are  not  only  different  from British press  editorials  but,  after  the partition  of  India,  each  country  has  developed  its  own  norms  of  producing discourse also.