Religious and Socio-cultural Influences on the Pakistani Wedding Invitation

Abstract

The Wedding Invitation is one of the significant text genres. Following genre analysis approach and discourse analysis (DA), the present research analysed the wedding invitation genres in Pakistan to explore generic structures, as well as the role played by the broader socio-cultural norms and values in shaping this genre. Therefore, a corpus of 50 wedding invitations in Urdu and English was randomly selected from cards received from January to June 2018. The results of this genre analysis revealed seven obligatory and one optional move in Urdu, while six obligatory and one optional move in English invitations. Through discourse analysis, it has been uncovered how religious association and cultural influence in Pakistani society shape textual selection. Little variation was displayed in the invitations of the two languages, presumably due to regional cultural reflections and recent influence of western values. A comparison of Pakistani and UK invitations showed differences not only in move selection but also in lexical choices which are shaped by the respective cultures.