Multilingual Discourse in News Broadcasting in Pakistani Urdu Channel: A Case Study

Abstract

Code-mixing is a common phenomenon in the modern multilingual and bilingual society and it occurs in media as such as it does in other domains of life. This research targeted to find out the scope of code-mixing practicing in Urdu news of a private news channel in Pakistan, and to catch out the equivalent words in Urdu language if there are. Qualitative approach has been applied using the method of Case study. The population consisted of Urdu news aired on the private News channel ARY by using Convenient and Purposive sampling techniques. Forty online audio-video bits and pieces on YouTube which were broadcasted on ARY News channel were recorded for the analysis as a sample. The purpose of this study is to investigate the nature of code switching between English and Urdu languages in light of Myers-Scotton’s (1993) Markedness Model .The tabulated data showed that the phenomenon of code-mixing is commonly practiced although having their equivalents in Urdu language. It reflected the general behaviour prevailing in the society about code mixing. The records assisted in finding out if code-mixing is dominant in Urdu news in particular channel and to what extent. Moreover, these recordings also helped to interpret, find substitute and word class of the English word inserted in the Urdu news.

Keywords: Case study, Code-mixing, Private Pakistani channel, Urdu news, English Language

DOI: 10.7176/JLLL/72-05

Publication date:October 31^st 2020