Localized Features in Pakistani Undergraduate Academic Writing: A World Englishes Perspective

Abstract

English language in the contemporary world is used (both spoken and written) by people of various linguistic and cultural backgrounds which has naturally led to the development of various localised varieties referred to as World Englishes. The English language, as is the case in Pakistan, has an official status and is primarily used for educational purpose and medium of communication in academia and certain other specific cocntexts in many countries across the world but is primarily spoken as a second/foreign language. The present paper discusses the ways in which characteristics of Pakistani English are represented in the academic composition of undergraduate students and how these characteristics indicate local linguistic and cultural influence and not language incompetence. It is a qualitative study that is carried out using written assignments by undergraduate English students in the Pakistani public sector universities/colleges. Moreover, the short questionnaire responses were employed to get an idea of how students perceive their use of English. The results indicate that the writing of students is often full of local terms, Urdu-based sentence structures, and culturally determined phrases. These attributes tend to be outside the mainstream British or American English norms, yet still has a communicative and pragmatic significance in the immediate local context reflecting a different sociolinguistic reality. The analysis of the observed patterns reflecting local Pakistani sociolinguistic reality should be considered in the context of World Englishes and not simply as errors as seen and evaluated in the traditional sense of the prescriptive and descriptive paradigms. The paper concludes by suggesting a more balanced approach to academic writing instruction that recognizes linguistic variation while still developing standard academic competence.

Keywords: World Englishes; Pakistani English; academic writing; undergraduate students; language variation.