DIGITAL IDENTITIES AND GENDERED CODE-SWITCHING: A CORPUS-BASED SOCIOLINGUISTIC STUDY OF ONLINE LANGUAGE PRACTICES IN PAKISTAN

Abstract

The role of gender in linguistic behaviour and identity formation in Pakistani social media discourse will be investigated in this paper. It is going to concentrate on the code-switching phenomenon between English and Urdu, the use of a corpus-based sociolinguistic approach to analyse online language use on the internet platforms such as Instagram, Facebook and X (used to be Twitter).Self-compiled corpus of social media texts will be subject to an analysis with the assistance of corpus tools, including AntConc and LancsBox, to identify the patterns of lexical selection, code-switching, and discourse markers. The research will be centered on the finding of the ways male and female users utilize language to achieve, negotiate and perform Pakistani digital identities within the sociocultural context. It will also apply the theories of language and identity as espoused by Bucholtz and Hall (2005) to point out how online communication has provided the evolving perception of gender, modernity and social belonging. The study will be useful in investigating how gender, bilingualism and digital communication interact to shape linguistic identity in contemporary Pakistani society.