The 'english' problem: Md analysis of reporting world in south asian newspapers

This study seeks to analyze linguistic variations among the varieties of English used in press in South Asia, i.e., Pakistan, India and Bangladesh (erstwhile pre-partition British India) in comparison with British English. We argue that these three distinct varieties of English have effectively evolved in this varied region where English was introduced through colonization. A corpus of World Reportage (WR) of 288 texts was analyzed using Biber's (1988) multidimensional model. Regression method was used for the computation of factor scores while analysis of variance (ANOVA) was performed to find the linguistic variations in the texts. The results provide substantial evidence that each country has developed its style of WR. Notably, however, Indian WR falls closer to the British WR to produce informational, narrative, nonargumentative and abstract discourse whereas Bangladeshi WR falls closer to British WR to produce explicit discourse. Further, Pakistani WR is found to be a distinct variety in comparison to all. The findings suggest that English language teaching, particularly ESP textbooks should include various varieties of English so that the journalism students are exposed to various writing styles of WR. The corpus developed for this study can also serve as the basis for designing curriculum and textbooks for journalism students.