Instagram English: How Pakistani Businesses Use Language to Attract Customers
Abstract
This study examines the use of language by the Pakistani companies on Instagram in attracting and engaging customers, focusing on Urdu–English code-switching, Roman Urdu, multimodal communication and persuasive moves. It draws on the theories of World Englishes, critical discourse analysis and multimodal semiotics and examines how commercial users employ a range of linguistic resources to construct brand selves which are culturally familiar, but also readable to broader audiences. Thus, this study investigates three dominant trends with model sample material representing 30 Instagram captions, businesses' Urdu and English content (bios, comments, hashtags), and the multimodal combination of emojis and commands, urgency signals, and politeness selection that collectively create convincing messages directed towards the buyer, 15 businesses in five areas (apparel, cuisine, beauty, electronics, services). The results suggest that Instagram English in Pakistan is a language variety on its own, a register in an outer circle variety that is shaped by features of Instagram, youth-oriented language use, and the sociolinguistic context of urban Pakistan. These results contributes to debates related to World Englishes online, demonstrates how language code-switching can be used as a promotional tool in online commerce in South Asia, and offers sustainable insights for businesses working in multilingual online environments. The results have also implications for sociolinguistic frameworks and digital marketing research and future corpus-driven and ethnographic studies.
Keywords: English on Instagram, Pakistani enterprises, online marketing language, World Englishes, and language alternation.
