This page covers every linguistics paper indexed in OpenAlex that has at least one author at a Pakistani university, from professors down to lecturers and research students. The papers are sorted into research themes and traced university by university. It shows which interests grew, which peaked, and which institutions went quiet for a while.
The river's width is the number of papers each year, and each coloured current is one research theme. Switch to Share of year to see what fraction of that year's research each theme made up. That view removes the effect of overall growth, so you can see real shifts in interest.
There are 13 detailed themes. Each line shows the theme's share of all linguistics papers, smoothed over three years. The badge compares 2005–14 with 2020–25. A theme is marked Peaked when its share was highest in 2015–19 and then fell back.
Each ridge is one university's yearly output, drawn to its own peak so the shape of its growth shows. The colour is its main research theme. An open circle on the baseline marks a pause: a year with no indexed papers after the university's first one. Click a ridge to open that university below.
These are the papers whose titles name a Pakistani language or Pakistani English. Urdu leads throughout. Pakistani English grew into a field of its own after 2017, and Saraiki, Balochi and the northern languages appear mostly after 2015.
Output rose from 12 papers in 2005 to 479 in 2024. Only 6% of all the papers in this dataset appeared before 2015, and the growth spread well beyond Islamabad and Lahore to Gujrat, Okara, Bahawalpur, Multan and Jamshoro.
English language teaching is still the largest theme at about a quarter of all papers. Its share was highest in 2015–19 (29%) and has since eased to 26% as other themes caught up.
Critical discourse analysis and pragmatics rose from 9% of papers in 2005–14 to 16% in 2020–25. Much of the work studies Pakistani newspapers, political speeches and textbooks.
Corpus linguistics rose from under 2% to 6%, led by GCU Faisalabad with 44 papers, then NUML, Gujrat and Okara. Phonetics and phonology fell from 6.5% to 3.7% of papers, even though the number of papers went up.
Papers on Saraiki, Balochi and the languages of the north are almost absent before 2015. They appear regularly from 2016, and Saraiki from 2020. Urdu is still the most-studied language every year.