A Comparative Corpus Analysis of the Folktales Corpus from Gilgit-Baltistan with the Fairytales Corpus from the Oxford Text Archive

Abstract

Folktales are an important part of any culture and have traditionally been associated with its
oral literature. Folktales usually contain the ideological and cultural capital of a society and
can be analyzed to explore the history of that society. This paper attempts to compare and
analyze a folktales corpus from Gilgit-Baltistan, Pakistan, with an already established online
Fairytales Corpus from the Oxford Text Archive. The target corpus (under analysis) contains
around eighteen thousand words, from around twenty folktales, mainly from the two major
languages (Shina and Balti) from the Gilgit-Baltistan region. The comparison and ensuing
analysis have been performed using a software platform, AntConc, using its analysis tools,
namely, ‘Word,’ ‘Keyword,’ ‘KWIC,’ and ‘Plot’. The analysis has identified that most of the
keywords are related to gender and religion. Along with the software, close reading strategies
have been employed to make sense of the results received from the software platform and
incorporate them into a critical understanding of the folktales. The analysis establishes that
these tales and the culture where these tales originated were prehistoric and pre-Islamic,
patriarchal, and that male characters were accorded more and better agency in those cultures.