Return of Afghans from Pakistan: Linguistic and Visual Portrayal in the International and Pakistani print Media

Abstract

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The majority of news items on Afghan immigrants in the International press refer to their arrival in different countries, and amongst them Pakistan is at the top, during and after the invasion of Soviet Union in 1979. However, the focus of this study is the return of Afghan immigrants from Pakistan in last six years. This study reports the linguistic and pictorial representation of the return of Afghan immigrants to their homeland from Pakistan. Three types of Van Leeuwen’s (2008, p.5) descriptive social network models are applied. Van Leeuwen’ models help to critically scrutinize the whole process in terms of linguistic and visual discourse analysis. It is found that in international news media tend to project superficially on the return of Afghan refugees with their own perspective, while in Pakistani print media, there are mixed reactions about the refugees. Also, the paper timely contributes to the knowledge about the Afghan refugees, who mostly do not want to go back to their homeland but they are forced to do so due to the wave of terrorism and conflict between Pakistan and Afghanistan governments.