A Corpus-Assisted Study on the Co-existence of Standard British and American Englishes in the Age of Globalization in Pakistan

Abstract

This research documents a comprehensive empirical documentation of the co-existence of Standard British English (SBE) and American Englishes (AmE) in modern Pakistan. This perspective leaves a critical gap within the existing sociolinguistics literature. The research employed a mixed-method approach, a sort of triangulation technique to investigate the empirical evidence collected from Pakistani corpus of 50,000 words, interviews (N-10), and questionnaires (N=50). The findings depict that the use of different terms from each standard variety is not random but a structured process. A clear clash emerged between the perceived prestige of Standard British English which is linked with official documentation, and the perceived utility of American English which is further associated with globalization and digitization. This majorly points towards the term “stratified diglossia” where the use of Standard British and American English within Pakistani English highlight depends on the context users are in. The respondents also reported the use of code-mixing, code-switching, and linguistic schizophrenia which is mostly context-driven. Consequently, the co-existence of British and American English is not a competition but a structured process and functional distribution which revolves around complex, dual-identity of a post-colonial country.