Linguistic Variation Among Pakistani Internet Blogs: A Multidimensional Analysis

Abstract

Pakistani English, being a non-native independent variety, has its registers that demonstrate linguistic variation at all levels. With the dawn of digital technology and the internet, new Internet registers, such as E-mails, Instant Messaging, Blogs, Tweets, and Facebook comments, emerged swiftly. Internet blogs are one of the text-based varieties of Computer-mediated discourse (CMD) and the most popular form of written internet registers. The principal aim of this research paper was to discover linguistic variation among Pakistani Internet blogs using Multidimensional (MD) methodology, initiated by Biber (1988). A specialized corpus of Pakistani internet blogs, having 469,837 words, was designed and disseminated into 11 sub-categories. The corpus tagged by Biber Tagger at Northern Arizona University, USA calculated 154 linguistic features. The mean values of all the sub-categories on five dimensions were compared to discover linguistic and situational variances among Pakistani internet blogs. Two-factor ANOVA was conducted to discover noteworthy statistical linguistic disparity among sub-registers of Pakistani internet blogs. The results of the study exposed significant linguistic and situational differences on five dimensions among different sub-categories of blogs. All the blog categories have revealed statistically significant linguistic differences on D1 and D4. The language of blogs has been observed as non-narrative, explicit, and abstract on D2, D3, and D5 respectively. The research will be significant for the future diachronic study of internet registers and Pakistani English. The corpus of blogs will be productive for computational linguists and researchers for new MD analysis, genre analysis, and critical discourse analysis. The detailed understanding of linguistic features of the language of blogs will help the second language teachers and students to improve their vocabulary, grammar, writing skills, and cognitive abilities.