Tracing Linguistic Evidence of Cultural Diversity: A Corpus-based Study

Abstract

Various factors, including culture, indigenous languages, and social norms, shape English being spoken and written in a foreign context. To trace the influence of these various factors, several registers/ genres can be investigated. However, the newspaper register is the most suitable as it is close to everyday events to study how the language has undergone a change. This study seeks to investigate the influence of these factors on the English used in a foreign context and explores the patterns of linguistic variation in the corpus of Cultural news from South Asian countries. A corpus from South Asian countries was compiled. Biber's (1988) multidimensional model was used. ANOVA was applied to find the statistically significant differences. The results indicate that Cultural press reportage of all the countries varies in producing explicit, non-argumentative and abstract discourse. The results indicate that as the cultural press reportage of every country is different, English used in a foreign context differs in producing newspaper discourse.