A COMPARATIVE CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF PAKISTANI AND INDIAN ENGLISH IN NEWSPAPER COVERAGE OF THE 2025 FLOOD CRISIS

Abstract

The current study examines the Pakistani English and Indian English newspapers’ discursive construction of the 2025 flood crisis, grounding the analysis within the framework of World Englishes and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). Drawing on Fairclough’s three-dimensional model (1989), the research investigates textual features, discursive practices, and socio-cultural contexts to reveal how language mediates disaster narratives in two neighbouring South Asian countries. A sample of thirty news reports from six leading English-language newspapers in Pakistan and India were taken, employing a qualitative, comparative analysis. The findings demonstrate clear divergences in disaster representation. Pakistani English newspapers predominantly frame floods as humanitarian emergencies, employing emotive lexicalization, passive constructions, and crisis-oriented narratives that foreground vulnerability, climate risk, and governance limitations. Indian English newspapers, by contrast, adopt a more procedural and bureaucratic discourse, emphasizing administrative control, technical expertise, and institutional accountability through active agency and policy-focused framing. Despite these differences, both varieties rely heavily on elite institutional sources, marginalizing the voices of affected communities. From a World Englishes perspective, the study shows how Pakistani and Indian English function as localized outer-circle varieties that balance global journalistic norms with national socio-political ideologies. The article contributes to disaster discourse scholarship by highlighting how English, as a shared transnational medium, simultaneously enables cross-border circulation of information and reproduces distinct national identities, power relations, and models of governance in climate crisis reporting.