Vivek Joshi
Independent Researcher
Maharashtra, India
Abstract
This study undertakes a comprehensive examination of the diachronic evolution of vocabulary used in Kannada newsprint political reporting over a 38-year span from 1980 to 2018. By constructing and analyzing a balanced corpus of 2,400 front-page political articles drawn from four leading Kannada newspapers—Prajavani, Vijaya Karnataka, Udayavani, and Kannada Prabha—the research employs a mixed-methods approach combining quantitative corpus-linguistic measures with qualitative discourse analysis. Quantitatively, we track changes in type-token ratios, lexical diversity, and the frequency of neologisms, particularly English borrowings versus indigenous coinages, across eight sub-corpora corresponding to successive five-year intervals. Qualitatively, we conduct close readings of concordance lines for high-frequency new terms, exploring semantic shifts, collocational patterns, and ideological nuances. Our findings reveal a steady increase in lexical variety, with type-token ratios rising from 0.056 in the early 1980s to 0.072 by the late 2010s, and an 18 percent overall growth in distinct word types. Neologism analysis shows that English loanwords comprised only 15 percent of new items in the 1980–84 period but surged to 62 percent by 2015–18, driven largely by globalization, digital media proliferation, and shifts in party communication strategies. Concurrently, traditional Sanskritized political idioms—once central to Kannada journalistic registers—experienced a relative decline of 25 percent, making way for simpler colloquial Kannada or hybrid forms. Semantically, core political terms such as “janata” and “power” (in transliteration) expanded their referential domains, reflecting new phenomena like “public court” framing of civil protests and the prominence of electricity sector debates. These linguistic developments point to the dynamic interplay between socio-political change and media discourse, suggesting that lexical innovation both mirrors and shapes public political engagement. By situating our results within theories of language contact, semantic shift, and critical discourse analysis, this study contributes novel insights to media linguistics in South Asia and offers a model for comparative research in other regional and digital news contexts.
Keywords
Kannada, Newsprint Vocabulary, Political Reporting, Corpus Linguistics, Lexical Change, Media Discourse
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