Variational Metapragmatics in South Asian Englishes: A Corpus-Based Study of Apology in Newspaper Writing

Abstract Variational metapragmatics—the study of how speakers talk or write about pragmatic actions and how they use their metapragmatic awareness to manipulate language perception across varieties of English as reported by Culpeper and Haugh (Pragmatics and the English language, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke 2014) (Schneider in J Pragm 179:12–18, 2021)—has recently sparked attention amongst linguistic scholars. Yet, despite notable exceptions (Schoppa in Corpus Pragmat 6:63–88, 2022; J Pragm 237:30–41, 2025) studies into postcolonial varieties of English are still sparse. As a result, metapragmatic realizations of apologies in South Asian Englishes—in general and in written genres such as newspaper writing in specific—remain underexplored. This paper fills that gap by investigating apology framing in four South Asian Englishes—Bangladeshi English (BdE), Indian English (IndE), Pakistani English (PkE) and Nepali English (NpE)—using the South Asian Varieties of English 2020 (SAVE2020) newspaper corpus (Bernaisch et al. in ICAME J 45(1):5–32, 2021). This study employs a random forest (Breiman in Mach Learn 45(1):5–32, 2001) including both structural (e.g. wordclass ) and sociobiographic (e.g. variety , gender ) predictors to model adherence to the pragmatic maxims of modesty and approbation as reported by Leech (Principles of pragmatics, Longman, London, 1983). Our results, amongst others, identify the interaction between variety and wordform as the most influential predictor: The findings demonstrate that South Asian Englishes exhibit their own pragmatic systems, even in presumably highly standardised genres. By applying a multifactorial, corpus-based approach to newspaper data, this study advances variational metapragmatics in terms of writers’ report on apologies and underlines the value of empirical methods for uncovering subtle interaction effects in world Englishes.