Abstract

Pakistani English as a non-native variety exhibits variation at different levels of language. Early quantitative studies on Pakistani English have compared individual linguistic features of Pakistani English with their counterparts in British English and claimed about the distinctive identity of Pakistani English as an indigenous variety. Pakistani English need to be compared at the level of register to further highlight its unique features and strengthen its distinct identity. Based on a special purpose corpus, the present research paper endeavors to investigate linguistic variation across disciplines in Pakistani academic writing as a register. Disciplinary variation is explored along with five new textual dimensions identified and labeled through the technique of Multidimensional analysis (Azher & Mehmood, 2016). The ANOVA results reveal that statistically significant differences are found among disciplines on all the new dimensions of Pakistani Academic Writing. The findings underline the implications for discipline-specific and register-based pedagogies with special reference to Pakistani English.

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