Ideological Framing and Ecolinguistic Construction of Climate Change in Pakistani English Newspaper Discourse

Abstract

Climate Change is one of the most serious challenges faced by Pakistan today. Pakistan's is one of the top 10 of the most climate-sensitive countries in the world. The issue of language is very significant in the Pakistani newspapers' representation of this crisis. Media language has influence on how the reader understands the issue of climate responsibility as well as the ecological risk and the role of the state. This study adopted a qualitative research design. The study explored how the climate change discourse is presented in the three major English newspapers in Pakistan i.e. Dawn, The Express Tribune and The Nation. There are 91 headlines in the data set from 2023 to 2026. The combination of two frameworks is used in this study. The first one is Van Dijk's Socio-Cognitive Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). The latter is Stibbe's "Ecolinguistics" (2015). We analyzed these elements, ideological framing, power relations, and the six ecolinguistic categories of framing, metaphor, identity, conviction, salience and erasure in a combined analysis. The results indicate that urgency language is used to highlight the climate crisis in all three newspapers. However, they also defy the voices of affected communities, and seldom question structural inequalities that leave people vulnerable to climate change. The study reveals some striking incongruities between urgency discourse and accountability of government in climate coverage of newspapers in Pakistan. The study adds to the existing body of literature on the environmental discourse in the media of South Asian countries.

Keywords: Climate Change Discourse, Critical Discourse Analysis, Ecolinguistics, Van Dijk, Stibbe, Pakistani Newspapers, Ideological Framing, Ecological Narratives