DIGITAL NATIONALISM AND IDEOLOGICAL POLARIZATION: ACORPUS ASSISTED CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OFTWITTER/X POLITICAL NARRATIVE IN SOUTH ASIA

Abstract

The present study explores the relationship between the digital nationalism and ideology polarization
in the political discourse of X in South Asia using Corpus-Assisted Critical Discourse Analysis
(CACDA). Social media networks are increasingly important political communication, ideological
contestation, and nationalist mobilization arenas in recent years. Twitter/X has become a digital
space in Pakistan, India and Bangladesh where the political, media, influencers and citizens are
developing opposing narratives and national identities. Although the importance of the Internet in
political communication is well recognized and its relevance to the study of nationalism and
polarization has been highlighted, there is still little research that has explored the linguistic
production of nationalism and polarization in online discourse from an integrated approach to corpus
linguistic and critical discourse analytical research. This study uses a mixed method which is a
combination of quantitative corpus technique and qualitative Critical Discourse Analysis. A corpus of
political and political related tweets/posts built from user selected hashtags, political campaigns and
major socio political events in South Asian region. Dominant lexical and ideological trends
determined through the use of corpus tools like frequency analysis, collocation patterns and
concordance analysis. The linguistic patterns then be analyzed from a socio-cognitive perspective of
Van Dijk and from a three-dimensional CDA perspective of Fairclough, with a view to understanding
how the political narratives create in-group solidarity, delegitimize ideology, and strengthen digital
polarization. The study claims that the political debates on Twitter/X in South Asia foster a
‘nationalism of emotions’ driven by binarisms and populist appeals, the use of religious signs and
symbols, and a tendency to represent the ‘other’ in an antagonistic fashion. The results are expected
to reveal digital nationalism as more than a feeling of patriotism but as a discursive process that
normalizes, amplifies and disseminates ideology in networked digital spaces.