Pakistan is a multilingual country where the Urdu language serves as lingua franca. Although Urdu is the national and official language of Pakistan, it bears the status of the second language (L2) in most of the regions due to the dominance of regional languages. The Punjabi language is the first language (L1) of the people of Punjab. This study intends to investigate the interlanguage influence and extralinguistic factors of phonological variants produced in the process of epenthesis of Punjabi palatal-affricate (/dʒ/) with the deletion of Urdu alveolar-fricative (/z/). The analysis of this study has been conducted using PRAAT software which proved that the native Punjabi speakers replace the /z/ sound with the /dʒ/ sound no matter if it occurs at the start, middle, or the end of a word. Moreover, this process of epenthesis is the result of the influence of the native language, i.e. Punjabi. The outcome of the analysis indicates that the gender and dwelling (urban or rural) of the participants have nothing to do with epenthesis. However, the education of the participants is the main reason for epenthesis.

The study presents a corpus-based analysis of the influence of COVID-19 on the lexical features of English in Pakistan. News on Web Corpus (NOW), managed by English-Corpora.org, formerly known as BYU Corpora, with a specification of English language used in web news of more than 70 websites form Pakistan, was used data analysis. The section of the corpus of English in Pakistan news on the web contains approximately more than one billion words. The usage of 58 keywords, including the top 20 collocated words given by Oxford Dictionary (OED, 2020a), following COVID-19, from 2017 to 2019, was compared to 2020 till June 17, 2020. The analysis shows an exponential rise in the use of some new words and acronyms (e.g., self-quarantine, nCoV, and SARS). Many words that existed previously were used in media discourses to a great extent after COVID-19 (e.g., self-isolation, social-distancing, pandemic, and virus). Moreover, the trends in using such words are different in Pakistan from the trends in the other part of the World. The findings of the study may be used to expand the existing knowledge about language change, viewing coronavirus pandemic (and similar events) on the wheels of technology as another possible socio-psychological factor of language change.

With the spread of Covid-19, many rumors, conspiracy theories, and discourse of fear came into existence. The mainstream media was one of the main sources to educate the masses against such idiosyncrasies and made them save themselves from the disease and its other harmful impacts. In line with this, the study aims at examining Covid-19 awareness campaigns on Pakistani TV channels critically. To evaluate the appropriateness of 24 campaigns/commercials, which were selected through a purposive sampling, a critical multimodal discourse analysis of the campaigns was carried out, using Systemic Functional Grammar proposed by Halliday (2013) (for linguistic resources) along with Kress and van Leeuwen’s Visual Grammar (for nonlinguistic resources). The analysis of campaigns revealed that a few campaigns (e.g., the campaigns of SAMAA TV, PTV, and ISPR) contain sociosemiotic resources (e.g., language, signs, sound, color, picture, animation, actions, etc.) that were more appropriate socio-psychically for Pakistani context, but most campaigns (e.g., the campaigns of Geo TV, ARY, etc.) lack the action-implicative discourse. The study suggests that TV campaigns be culturally and psychologically fit to the context and be action-implicative

The genre of metapoetry thematizes the fictional elements – the inspiration of a poet, his poetic process, meta-poetic metaphors, the role of the poet in society, and intertextual references – partaking in the making of poetry explicitly or implicitly carried through a poem within a poem technique. This paper presents Eva Müller-Zettlemann’s theoretical pronunciation of meta-poetic elements, i. e., poetic inspiration, poetic process, and meta-poetic metaphors, at play in the metalyrics of Taufiq Rafat from his anthologies Arrival of the Monsoon: Collected Poems 1947-78 (1985) and Half Moon: Poems 1979-1983 (2008). Rafat’s inspiration is the South-Asian terra firma and lived experience that makes him infuse the regional sensibility through a poetic process of perceiving and penning down immediately. His meta-poetic metaphor involves the invention of an image of cultural genesis that informs the process of poetic creativity. Moreover, the study also considers the explicit expression of the role of the poet in society and the functions of poetry in Rafat’s poems, otherwise a prose phenomenon. Thus, the paper analyzes the conscious expression of the construction of South-Asian singularity inspired by the cultural kernel in content and form in Rafat’s metalyrics.