From quota reform to regime change: A comparative corpus-assisted discourse analysis of Bangladesh’s July Uprising

In the rapidly shifting landscape of digital-era protest, Bangladesh’s July Uprising stands out as a pivotal moment where demands for quota reform evolved into a broader call for systemic transformation. Using the framework of Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS), this paper analyzes two corpora of 380 news reports comprising 332,259 tokens published by Prothom Alo and Jamuna Television between 1 July when the protest first came to public attention, and 5 August, the day the regime fell, thereby capturing the outlets’ full coverage of the event. The results reveal that Prothom Alo sustained an institutional, formal language of immediacy and confirmation, with temporal deixis such as “today” and “yesterday”, and lexical fields of bureaucratic justice: “quota reform movement”. Yet, with increasing state repression, its vocabulary gradually got to terms such as “arrest” and “tear gas” that indicated an escalating tension, reframing the protests as reverberations of authoritarian excess. Meanwhile, in a vocabulary abounding with urgency, resistance, and passion, Jamuna Television portrayed students as protesters but not just that, as torchbearers of a democratic movement. The terms like “Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina” turned into focal points, and “attack on protesters” pulled the narrative into a moral universe, foregrounding a regime-critical stance, where the state was no longer a neutral entity but a power to be addressed, challenged, and held to account.