Manufacturing the Margins: How Language Constructs Ethnic Politics in Pakistan
Ethnicity in Pakistan is not merely inherited—it is manufactured, mobilized, and manipulated through language, particularly by political elites who frame ethnic identities not only in reference to race, language, or geography but increasingly in terms of loyalty, ideology, and affiliation, converting politics into ethnicity and ethnicity into discourse.
When a politician refers to “our Baloch brothers” or frames “mohajirs” as having “sacrificed everything for Pakistan,” they are not simply reflecting ethnic realities—they are constructing cognitive models that define those groups in terms of victimhood, gratitude, or threat, and through such discursive acts, ethnicity becomes a political artifact, not a demographic fact.
Van Dijk’s socio-cognitive framework clarifies this process: political actors use language to activate shared mental representations—scripts that connect ethnicity to historical trauma, ideological affiliation, or regional grievance—and through repeated lexical patterns and syntactic choices, these representations become normative truths.
What is less discussed, however, is how political affiliation itself is ethnicized—how political parties in Pakistan actively construct their own support bases as ethnic blocs, turning partisan allegiance into a kind of imagined ethnicity, complete with linguistic cues, behavioural stereotypes, and moral hierarchies.
The PTI is often discursively framed—and frames itself—as the party of the urban, upwardly mobile, digitally fluent, morally awakened, and institutionally betrayed Pakistani; this is not a sociological description, but an ethnicization of political identity, in which a class position is translated into a quasi-ethnic narrative of shared virtue, struggle, and righteousness.
Conversely, the PPP’s symbolic repertoire—Bhutto iconography, rural Sindhi slogans, and anti-centre sentiment—constructs a loyalist identity rooted in martyrdom, dispossession, and federalist pride, producing a discursive Sindh that is more ideological than geographical.
Similarly, the PML-N has long cultivated a political ethnicity centred on the Punjabi trader-industrialist, loyal to infrastructure, order, and stability, thereby scripting the Central Punjabi identity as rational, conservative, and developmental—an identity reinforced by electoral slogans and regional campaign strategies that racialize policy preferences.
These formations—though not formally ethnic—function as discursive ethnicities, each with their own lexicon, mythos, affective repertoire, and imagined enemies, and this phenomenon reveals the true scope of how language is used to convert political choice into tribal identity.
In talk shows, this becomes even more explicit: panelists often refer to “PTI walay,” “Nooni voters,” “Bhutto deewanay” as if describing cultural tribes rather than ideological communities, normalizing a grammatical shorthand for political essentialism, where every voter is cast as a character in a morality tale, not as a thinking citizen.
This linguistic essentialism fosters political polarization not just ideologically but ontologically—one is not simply supporting a party, one belongs to it, and that belonging carries a semantic weight that defines one’s values, loyalties, and even one’s access to legitimacy or suspicion.
This is further deepened by code-switching and register variation, where politicians switch between Urdu, English, and regional languages to signal group belonging or perform authenticity—Imran Khan's switching between English moralism and Urdu populism, Bilawal Bhutto’s rehearsed Sindhi inserts, Maryam Nawaz’s invocation of Punjabi maternal tropes—these are not simply rhetorical strategies but acts of discursive identity construction.
Moreover, ethnic references in crisis further entrench marginality: in moments of national upheaval, state officials often frame unrest in ethnic terms—“Baloch separatists,” “Pashtun militants,” “Sindhi nationalists”—thus tying deviance to ethnicity and protecting the centre by pathologizing the periphery.
Equally, the silence about ethnic grievances in national media—lack of Sindhi or Balochi voices in mainstream narratives, the frequent erasure of regional languages from official broadcasts, the dominance of Urdu-English bilingualism as the standard of political expression—performs what Gayatri Spivak might call a “linguistic subalternity,” where groups are not only marginal in power, but voiceless in form.
And yet, as van Dijk argues, these discourses do not operate in abstraction—they rely on repetition, schemata, and cognitive routinization; over time, they become default ways of seeing others, ways of narrating loyalty and threat, ways of mapping legitimacy across the nation-state.
To challenge this architecture of linguistic ethnicity, Pakistan must move beyond calls for tolerance and into discursive literacy—citizens and journalists alike must ask: Who is speaking, in what voice, on whose behalf, and with which assumptions?—because political violence often begins in metaphor, and civil war often begins in syntax.
If this nation is to navigate its pluralism not merely as a burden but as a political gift, it must begin by dismantling the semantic hierarchies that hold it hostage—where Urdu dominates but excludes, where English confers power but alienates, and where ethnicity is less a demographic detail than a discursive destiny imposed by the ruling elite.
