The Linguistic Representation of the Taliban in the Afghani Newspaper, Comparison Between Before and After the Power Change

Abstract: Bearing in mind the big role media plays in shaping public opinion and the importance of understanding how ideologies can be conveyed to the public through language, this study uses qualitative analysis to investigate the discursive representation changes around the existence of the Taliban or what they call themselves now, the Islamic Emirate, in the Afghan media before and after the power shift. In specific, it illustrates how linguistic devices are used to transmit the discourse changes through the used language in the Afghani newspaper to legitimize or delegitimize having the Taliban in Afghanistan. The primary data of this study consists of articles published in English from a digitalized newspaper published in Afghanistan. This study uses Corpus Linguistics to organize the findings around the representation of the Taliban in the gathered data. Findings results were analyzed through CDA and Fairclough, the three-dimensional model, to reveal the alteration that occurred to the discourse, which can, in turn, show the way how language devices are used to circulate the Taliban’s various images among the recipients.