Silenced by Tradition: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Women’s Linguistic Marginalization in Pakistani Socio-Cultural Texts

This study examines how women’s identities are represented, relationally defined, or omitted in three forms of Pakistani sociocultural text: wedding invitations, obituaries, and epitaphs. Using Norman Fairclough’s three-dimensional Model of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), it considers textual choices, the practices through which texts are produced and interpreted, and the wider social meanings associated with naming and public remembrance. The dataset comprises approximately 60 artifacts collected from physical and digital sources in Quetta, Islamabad, and nearby settings identified in the original dataset. The analysis focuses on the visibility of women’s personal names, relational labels, honorifics, professional titles, and the prominence accorded to male relatives. Across the three genres, the examples show recurring patterns in which women are sometimes unnamed or represented primarily through kinship relations, while men’s names, titles, and public roles receive greater textual visibility. Some artifacts, particularly those associated with urban settings, include women’s names or professional identities; however, naming does not always displace relational framing. These findings suggest that routine cultural texts can reproduce gendered hierarchies through apparently conventional choices of identification and remembrance. As the study analyses artifacts rather than producers’ intentions, it interprets these patterns as gendered representation, not deliberate exclusion. The study contributes a focused Pakistani case study to feminist linguistic and critical discourse research and recommends broader, systematically feminist linguistics and critical discourse research and recommends broader sampling and interviews in future research. Keywords: Critical Discourse Analysis; gender; naming practices; linguistic marginalization; wedding invitations; obituaries; epitaphs