Diachronic Register Variation in Saudi Business Journalism: A Multidimensional Analysis of the Vision 2030 Period

This study investigates diachronic register variation in Saudi business journalism across three stages of Vision 2030. Using Biber’s multidimensional framework, the study examines whether English-language business news in Saudi Arabia has changed in terms of informational density, narrative orientation, explicitness, overt persuasion, and abstract or impersonal style. The corpus consists of 571 business news texts collected from Arab News, Saudi Gazette, and the Saudi Press Agency. The texts are divided into three periods: 2016 to 2018, representing the early stage of Vision 2030; 2020 to 2022, representing the middle stage; and 2024 to 2026, representing the recent stage. Each text was prepared as a 400-token analytical sample, tagged for multidimensional features, normalised, and assigned scores on Biber’s five textual dimensions. One-way ANOVA, Levene’s test, Welch and Brown–Forsythe robust tests, and Tukey HSD post hoc comparisons were used to examine period-based differences. The findings show the strongest linguistic change in Dimension 1 and Dimension 4. Saudi business journalism became substantially more informational across the three periods, while overt persuasive and argumentative marking declined significantly. Dimension 2 and Dimension 3 showed more limited and period-specific variation, while Dimension 5 remained broadly stable despite some evidence from robust tests. Overall, the results suggest that Saudi business journalism has moved from a comparatively more persuasive and developmental style in the early Vision 2030 period toward a more informational, institutional, and report-oriented register in the recent period. The study contributes to corpus-based register analysis, Saudi media discourse research, and the linguistic study of economic journalism.