Language, Power and Institutional Identity in Pakistani Courtroom Discourse: An Ethnography of Communication

Abstract

This ethnographic study examines how language enacts power and institutional identity in Pakistani courtroom discourse, situating trial-court interaction within Dell Hymes's (1964) ethnography of communication tradition. Grounded in the persistent asymmetry between English as the official language of record and Urdu/Punjabi as the spoken languages of litigants (Haidar, 2019), the study explores how judges, advocates, and witnesses negotiate authority through talk. Guided by Hymes's SPEAKING framework and Fairclough's (2015) language-and-power model as the theoretical lens for data analysis, the research adopts a qualitative ethnographic design combining non-participant observation, audio-recorded proceedings, field notes, and semi-structured interviews. The population comprised 35 courtroom actors across two District Courts in Lahore — 8 judges, 12 advocates, 10 witnesses/litigants, and 5 court readers — from whom 15 participants (5 judges, 5 advocates, 5 witnesses) were purposively sampled alongside 10 observed sessions. Findings reveal that code-switching, turn allocation, and formulaic legalese systematically privilege institutional speakers and marginalize lay witnesses, reproducing colonial linguistic hierarchies. The study contributes an ethnographically grounded account of institutional identity construction in South Asian legal settings and recommends bilingual courtroom reform.