Climate Change Discourse: A Comparative Study of English and Hindi Newspapers in India

Abstract

This research paper investigates the differing emphases on heatwave-specific environmental reporting in the two most widely circulated newspapers in India: The Times of India in English and Dainik Bhaskar in Hindi. It deploys a framework developed by ecolinguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to analyse 498 articles from The Times of India and 279 articles from Dainik Bhaskar, from 1^st May 2025 to 30^th June 2025, according to the following criteria: climate mention explicitness, the severity of the crisis,news source attribution, the framing of responsibility and accountability, and the presence or absence of systemic critique. The results suggest that the newspapers frame climate risk in particular but internally congruent ways. The Times of India generally uses a more policy-driven writing style, with institutional attribution and a moderate crisis discourse. Dainik Bhaskar, on the other hand, highlights day-to-day experience, emotional language and impacts on local communities. Interestingly, Dainik Bhaskar mentions climate change moreoften, at 85.66% (compared to 58.63% for The Times of India), and exhibits a slightly stronger structural critique, at 45.52% versus 42.77%, although both papers are largely similar in their framing of accountability. The paper contends that these differences are not random. They are informed by audience expectations, editorial practices, and, in particular, by the different roles the English- and Hindi-language mass media play in shaping how elite and mass publics perceive climate risk. On the whole, the study makes a language- and evidence-based contribution to investigations into climate communication, environmental journalism, and media plurality in multilingual India.