Linguistic Sexism in ‘Rishta Culture’ of Peshawar: A Feminist Stylistic Analysis of Matrimonial Advertisements in Newspapers

Abstract

This study looks at the language of matrimonial advertisements in Mashriq and Express newspapers in Peshawar to investigate the implicit linguistic sexism against women. A qualitative methodology is paired with a content analysis approach to examine twenty-two advertisements, eleven from each newspaper from June 2022 to February 2023. The language of the two most widely read newspapers has been observed to perpetuate and strengthen the mainstream discourse that expects women to fulfil certain criteria set by the patriarchal society for being marriageable. The present work investigates the use of semantically derogatory lexical items and lexical asymmetry at the word level; presuppositions, inferences, and readymade/set phrases at the sentence level, and adjectives (beautifiers, religious, cultural), characterization, fragmentation, and focalization at discourse level in the language of the ads through the lens of Sara Mills’s Feminist Stylistics (1995). The findings suggest that the language of print media at the word, sentence, and discourse levels plays an important role in reinforcing the stereotypes about women which authenticates the existing social hierarchies as natural and inevitable. The work is significant in delineating the inherent sexism against women entrenched in the lingua-franca of Peshawar, i.e., Urdu, keeping in view the notion of matrimony within socio-cultural and socio-religious contexts of Peshawar. The study critiques the language of advertisements, written, edited, and published by the males, for the males. It calls for language reforms in language at the institutional level, at the level of gatekeepers of language.