Language, Power, and Class: Dissecting Social Inequality in the Fiction of Tariq Rahman

This research paper is based on a linguistic analysis of the theme of class clash in Tariq Rahman’s short stories, Charity and The Moustache. It followed a qualitative research design since the analysis of data was through the lens of interpretative research paradigm. Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) was applied for the interpretation of the texts in which Fairclough’s 3D model was used for an in-depth analysis of the short stories. The Fairclough model analyzes a text in three stages in which the first stage is Text Analysis where the text’s language is analyzed in detail. The second stage is Discourse Practice, which examines how texts are deduced and produced. The third stage is Sociocultural Practice, which puts the text in a larger social and cultural context. The study found that the language used in the short stories mainly focused on how characters of different classes communicate. Intense descriptions were utilized to highlight the differences between the lower and upper classes. Through these methods the short stories revealed the power imbalance between classes and also made an attempt to enable the readers feel empathy for the exploited class. The research further found that there was a presence of selected theme, class clash, in the text of the selected short stories. The research was concluded that the texts used certain discursive techniques to present class clash. Some linguistic features were also used to show through the language that the upper class exploited the lower class and deprived them from the available resources.