Aug 2026· SMART MOVES JOURNAL IJELLH· pp. 42-60· 0 citations
Abstract
Hindi popular cinema in its studio era as well as in its OTT era has been an enduring medium through which speaker types have been socially encoded. The paper uses a bounded corpus of 2025 Hindi language feature films (40 theatrically released and two long-form web series) to explore how the language and paralinguistic decisions create and produce stereotypes of regions, religion, class, occupation, and gender, and how these decisions have changed in the OTT era. The unit of analysis is the character-scene, which is an individual character in an identifiable scene; utterances, accent features, lexical selection, address form and code-mixing are coded as embedded units. Operationalization of six stereotype categories is done by explicit indicator sets and not by impressionistic labels. Gendered language is distinguished from sexist language as the former is grammatical or referential, the latter evaluative and derogatory, placing women in an inferior, subordinate, or consumable position. Dialogue in Hindi–Urdu language is consistently romanised, and each cited example includes a romanised original, an English translation, identification of the speaker, and context for the scene. The paper shows that, while the stereotype grammar of Bihari-as-comic, Christian-as-westernized, English-speaking-woman-as-morally-suspect has been somewhat replaced, it has not been eliminated from the OTT corpus and that gendered-language markings continue to be used even though overt sexist framings are absent.
The paper presents a cognitive-discursive study of the gendered proverb Boys will be boys with the focus on its actional and metalinguistic dimensions. The main aim is to explore the discursive dichotomy of the dictum, i.e. its role in 1) perpetuating gender stereotypes about men and reinforcing gendered expectations in Anglo-American society, and, more recently, in 2) reflecting and promoting change catalyzed by the gender equality movement. The material comprises 400 examples, including texts from online articles, opinion pieces, blogs, social media posts, and memes spanning the last twenty years. The research methods applied were Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Sociocognitive Discourse Studies (SCDS) methodology, complemented by the linguocultural method, stylistic analysis, sampling and corpus methodology. The comprehensive analysis of the linguistic, cognitive, and discursive profiles of the dictum Boys will be boys suggests that the gender stereotype embedded in the proverb is being challenged and redefined in discourse, both via canonical and recycled (modified) use, resulting in anti-proverbs. The anti-proverbial derivations attest to significant shifts in social norms and encapsulate sociopolitical change.
In recent years, so-called "gender-neutral language" has become a point of discursive contention in the public sphere, especially in cyberspace. Far from being restricted to a strictly linguistic issue, this debate mobilizes political, ideological, and symbolic disputes related to the inclusion, visibility, and recognition of subjects who do not identify with the gender binary. From the perspective of materialist Discourse Analysis, this article aims to analyze statements about gender-inclusive language through a discursive analysis of discursive sequences (DS) extracted from episode "#29: Neutral Language – Interview with Sérgio Freire" (2024), broadcast by the podcast Calma, Gente Horrível. The corpus is taken as a digital discursive materiality marked by orality and circulation in cyberspace, highlighting a subject who occupies an institutional place of authority to speak about language. Methodologically, the study relies on the selection and interpretation of DS, considered as significant materialities traversed by historical and ideological conditions of production. The results indicate that gender-inclusive language functions as a space for taking a stand, in which linguistic choices produce political effects frequently erased by discourses that present themselves as technical or neutral. Furthermore, the very term "neutral language" is problematized, highlighting its constitutive contradiction, since language is understood as intrinsically political.
This study examines the visual stereotypes constructed toward the Jewish minority in the popular satire publication Şaka magazine during the critical wartime years of World War II (1943–1944). Shaped under the intense socio-economic climate of the era, particularly following the implementation of the Wealth Tax (Varlık Vergisi), these representations are analyzed through an intersectional framework of ethnicity, gender, and class. Utilizing Roland Barthes’ visual semiotic model (denotation, connotation, and myth) in tandem with Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity, the research conducts an in-depth analysis of a systematically selected archival sample centered on repeating characters such as Rebeka, Salamon, and Moiz. The analysis identifies two primary representational trajectories that systematically establish marginalized social categorization: opportunistic and affluent figures presented through the representations of 'Corrupt Modernity' and 'Exotic Other'. The findings reveal that humor functioned as a sharp ideological apparatus during this period, fixing the non-Muslim identity as an existential, moral, and economic "Other." By mapping out these specific visual codes and performance patterns, this research demonstrates that wartime hostility was actively enforced through the weaponization of gender roles and class degradation within print media, thereby contributing a rigorous, monographic perspective to the literature on minority representation in World War II-era Turkey.
Berna Akdeniz· OPUS Journal of Society Rese...· 0 citations
In this study, one would explore the modern day digital space in Pakistan as a space of contestation and negotiation in terms of language, and how postcolonial anxieties, class boundaries, and ethnolinguistic identities clash in this market. Traditionally, English and standardised Urdu have been over-emphasised and given a greater symbolic and socioeconomic status than indigenous regional languages (Punjabi, Pashto, Sindhi, etc.) which have been institutionally marginalised and caricatured in the mainstream media. A qualitative digital ethnographic research design is used in this paper to analyse a sample of vlogs and music videos of six major multilingual creators in Pakistan: Irfan Junejo, Ali Gul Pir, Tamkenat Mansoor, Adnan Zafar (Ken Doll), Babar Mangi and Irfan Khan. The study, using Pierre Bourdieu's notions of ‘linguistic capital', ‘habitus' and the ‘linguistic market' and Carol Myers-Scotton's ‘Matrix Language Frame Model' maps how these creators use code switching, accent stylization and visual-linguistic semiotics to subvert post-colonial hierarchies. The results show that these digital performances are not only engaged in overt political resistance, such as criticizing feudalism and patriarchy but also in covert advocacy, such as producing a high-status regional habitus that is associated with marginalized dialects with global luxury and modern youth subcultures. But, such a digital democratization is hindered by the digital divide and also by active policing of the audience, often leading to trolling and political backlash of creators. In conclusion, the present study reveals that digital spaces can enable a counter-hegemonic ‘plurilingual habitus' which is an important step in decolonizing the post-colonial linguistic space in Pakistan.
Ali Raza, Kainat, Tariq Usman Corresponding Author· Journal of innovative resear...· 0 citations
This article does a comparative study of the narrative strategies of O.V.Vijayan (1930-2005) and R.K.Narayan (1906-2001), two towering figures in Indian Literature who worked in fundamentally different linguistic registers and with divergent aesthetic and political commitments. Vijayan, writing primarily in Malayalam, is positioned here as a practitioner of vernacular modernism whose linguistic experimentation with dialect, myth, and indigenous oral forms constitutes a form of decolonial praxis. His self-translations into English, rather than smoothing the rough edges of the vernacular, are read as acts of rewriting that negotiate the politics of translation and postcolonial representation. R.K. Narayan, by contrast, operated exclusively within the English literary tradition, adopting what might be termed a domesticated realism shaped in part by his relationship with Western publishing and mentorship. This paper argues that while Narayan’s Malgudi fiction performs a subtle resistance to colonial epistemologies through irony and humor, his narrative form remains embedded in Eurocentric realist convention that limits the scope of his decolonial critique. The paper subjects that claim to rigorous factchecking, nuancing the comparison where necessary, and situates both writers within the broader frameworks of postcolonial theory, Global South literary studies, and the politics of literary language.
N. Bhavani Singh, S. Singh· Social Science Journal for A...· 0 citations
This article examines how selected Uzbek folk rituals use verbal forms to organize relationships among participants, natural forces, material objects, and socially significant transitions. The study focuses on four ritual complexes: the rain-making ceremony Sust Xotin, the wind-stopping ceremony Choymomo, the wedding greeting Kelin Salom, and the forty-day transitional period known as Chilla. Rather than claiming an exhaustive corpus or new ethnographic fieldwork, the research undertakes a qualitative reanalysis of ritual texts and descriptions reported in published Uzbek folklore scholarship and heritage documentation. The analytical framework combines lexical-semantic analysis, morphosyntactic description, conceptual metaphor, and speech-act-oriented pragmatics. The findings indicate four recurrent tendencies within the selected material: the personification of natural forces through kinship vocabulary; the use of imperative, optative, and hortative forms to express culturally intended action; the association of colour and household vocabulary with purity, protection, and social order; and the use of taboo avoidance and euphemistic naming during periods of perceived vulnerability. These tendencies do not establish a single, uniform Uzbek ritual system, and their historical origins cannot be determined from textual similarity alone. They nevertheless demonstrate how ritual discourse links linguistic form with communal expectations and culturally transmitted models of efficacy. The article concludes by proposing a source-transparent digital corpus of Uzbek ritual language that records regional, textual, and performance variation.
S. Davronova· Science and innovation· 0 citations
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