Linguistic Imperialism and Discourse Colonialism in Pakistani English Medium Education Policy: A Critical Postcolonial Discourse Analysis

Abstract

The present study aims to explore the linguistic imperialism and discourse colonialism in Pakistani English-medium instruction (EMI) education policy using Critical Postcolonial Discourse Analysis (CPCDA). The study is based on colonial linguistic discourse in Pakistan, which establishes a linguistic hierarchy and ideology from a Postcolonial perspective. The study employed a qualitative interpretivist paradigm based on the theory of Linguistic Imperialism (Phillipson) and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) (Fairclough) with a post-colonial approach as proposed by Bhabha, Fairclough, Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin. The documents analysed were official policy texts of national and provincial EMI policies, which were collected through a documentation procedure that involved a population of twelve (N = 12) national and provincial EMI policy documents from 2009 to 2025. Considering the National Education Policy 2009, the National Education Policy 2017-2025, and the Single National Curriculum 2020-21, six (n = 6) documents were selected using purposive, criterion-based sampling. The results showed the presence of five repetitive codes of discourse: ‘globalist legitimation,' ‘functional bifurcation,' ‘implementation erasure,' ‘colonial residue naming,' and ‘elite/mass stratification,' and that colonial genealogy was always undermentioned throughout the corpus. The results reveal that the policy discourse of Pakistani EMI is reproducing the linguistic hierarchy through naturalisation and omission instead of assertion, thereby extending the linguistic imperialism theory to a finer-grained level to analyse the national policy.