SHAPING ADVICE THROUGH ENGLISH: A CRITICAL DISCOURSEANALYSIS OF AUNTIE AGNI’S ADVICE COLUMN IN DAWNNEWSPAPER

Abstract

Advice columns constitute influential sites of everyday meaning-making, where language mediates personal
guidance, social norms, and cultural values. This study offers a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) of
Auntie Agni, a popular advice column published in Dawn, Pakistan’s leading English-language newspaper,
to examine how advice is linguistically and ideologically constructed through Pakistani English. Drawing
on Fairclough’s three-dimensional model of CDA, the study analyses 52 advice columns published between
January and December 2025 at the levels of text, discursive practice, and sociocultural practice. At the
textual level, the findings show that advice is framed through direct address, soft modality, evaluative
reassurance, metaphor, humour, and culturally embedded idioms, constructing an empathetic and nonauthoritarian advisory voice. Discursively, the column blends therapeutic, religious, moral, and
educational discourses, positioning the columnist as an expert–friend who negotiates authority through
intimacy rather than prescription. At the sociocultural level, the analysis reveals how the column engages
with key Pakistani social concerns, including family authority, gender norms, marriage, mental health
stigma, education pressure, and class anxiety, not by rejecting them outright but by subtly reinterpreting
and renegotiating them. Situated within the framework of World Englishes (2009), the study demonstrates
that Pakistani English in Auntie Agni functions as a localized, culturally resonant variety used for
emotional counselling and moral guidance rather than as a marker of elite or Western identity. By
foregrounding advice discourse as a neglected media genre in Pakistani English scholarship, this study
fills an important empirical and theoretical gap, showing how newspaper advice columns operate as sites
of ideological, emotional, and cultural pedagogy in contemporary Pakistan.