The linguistic representation of gender ethnicity, and social class in Pakistan television drama

Abstract

The paper is a discourse analysis of the construction and negotiation of the identities of gender, ethnicity and social classes in Pakistani TV dramas and movies. Based on a mixed-method corpus of contemporary popular TV serial fare and feature films (2000-2025), the study employs the Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and other sociolinguistic and methodological tools to study lexical choices, conversational routines, code -switching, dialect representation, politeness strategies, and reported speech. The research poses the question of how cinema and television discourse replicates, disrupts or Circumvents general social order and stereotyped roles of identity. Data is obtained through purposive sampling of interaction-indexing scenes of camera systematic observation (family, workplace, judiciary, city streets), transcribed into a search-able corpus, and coded qualitatively through recurrent linguistic patterns linked with gendered signifiers of social identity (gender, ethnic identity signals (e.g. Punjabi, Pashto, Sindhi language traits), and embodiments of social status (formal vs. colloquial registers, lexical prestige). The results will aim to discover the discursive dynamics of how media enact social meanings, to trace the overlaps of language and power within the Pakistani audiovisual culture and to support development of media guidelines and media policy recommendations in the direction of new volume in representation. The paper makes a contribution to sociolinguistics, media studies, cultural studies as it develops a formula to read language in Pakistani screen narratives as ideologically loaded.

Keywords: Pakistan media; discourse analysis; critique; sociolinguistics; gendered representations; ethnicity; social group; code switching; drama TV; motion picture.