A Comparative Corpus-Based Analysis of the Framing of the US–Iran Conflict in Pakistani Urdu- and English-Language Print Media

Abstract

This corpus-based critical discourse analysis explores the linguistic and ideological framing of the military war between the USA and Iran in 2026 in Pakistani English- and Urdu-language print media. The study examines how geopolitical crises are generated under similar macroeconomic conditions but different sociolinguistic pressures in two bilingual media systems: Dawn and the Daily Times in the English group and Dunya along with specialist, highbrow editorial pages in the Urdu group. The present study compares the frequency of keywords, collocation patterns, key-word-in-context patterns, semantic prosody, and metaphoric representations based on two theories: Robert Entman’s framing theory and Semetko and Valkenburg’s generic framing model. The quantitative results indicate that the Urdu language corpus is more likely to use active moral judgment, and the English language corpus is more likely to use diplomatic sequencing and multilateralism. The study presents the Pakistani print media as a dual-register public space that offers strategic neutrality and policy-oriented realism to English-reading elites while mobilizing Urdu-reading masses through moralistic and sovereign narratives, supported by a meticulous analysis of authentic Unicode Urdu texts transliterated using consistent ALA-LC romanization patterns. The findings have implications for critical media literacy and foreign policy analysis and add to our knowledge of the portrayal of geopolitical conflict in multilingual postcolonial states.