LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow

Volume 12 : 7 July 2012
ISSN 1930-2940

Managing Editor: M. S. Thirumalai, Ph.D.
Editors: B. Mallikarjun, Ph.D.
         Sam Mohanlal, Ph.D.
         B. A. Sharada, Ph.D.
         A. R. Fatihi, Ph.D.
         Lakhan Gusain, Ph.D.
         Jennifer Marie Bayer, Ph.D.
         S. M. Ravichandran, Ph.D.
         G. Baskaran, Ph.D.
         L. Ramamoorthy, Ph.D.
Assistant Managing Editor: Swarna Thirumalai, M.A.

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Strategies of Language Appropriation in Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns

Muhammad Safeer Awan, Ph.D.
Muhammad Ali, M.Phil., Ph.D. Candidate

Abstract

Indigenization of English, especially in the creative writings of the former colonized countries, is an established phenomenon that is taking ever new forms and gaining popular currency with the spread of postcolonial literatures around the world. Apart from the colonial experience, globalization and immigration are two other shaping forces that are contributing to the emergence of such works that appropriate English and incorporate the cultural sensibilities of the non-English societies.

The linguistic abrogation is the postcolonial writers’ rejection of the notion of a singular, Standard English. Postcolonial writing pursues this agenda. However appropriate may be the dominant language to capture and describe the local reality, the Standard English is no more the language of cultural imperialism.

Most of the times, in cross-cultural texts, it is the parenthetic translation of individual words that indicates the cultural difference. Such glosses indicate an implicit gap between the word and the referent. This gap turns the glossed word into a cultural sign. Another strategy of conveying the sense of cultural distinctiveness is leaving the words un-translated. Sometimes such words are left un-glossed with a context to give their meaning. In postcolonial texts, this political act of leaving the words un-translated indicates that the text is written in an ‘other’ language. Some postcolonial writers fuse the linguistic structures of two languages generating an ‘inter-culture’. Further, a blend of local language syntax with the lexical forms of English is also frequent in postcolonial writings.

Code-switching is the most common strategy of appropriating the language. Kachru sorted out some other strategies of appropriation – lexical innovations, translation equivalence, contextual redefinition, as well as rhetorical and functional styles. While the researchers of the present study, taking their cue from the strategies of language appropriation as pointed out by Kachru and Ashcroft et.al., have applied them to Khalid Hosseini’s novel A Thousand Splendid Suns (2007), they have discovered two new linguistic strategies in Hosseini’s novel.

Keywords: Language appropriation; Hosseini; A Thousand Splendid Suns; Postcolonial literature/English.

Introduction

The colonial experience left indelible marks on the cultures and languages of both the colonized and the colonizers. This has been famously theorized by Bhabha (1994) and sufficiently debated since. In the wake of colonization, the subsequent beginnings of the post-imperial age, globalization via the United Nations, and increasing interdependence of nations due to world trade agreements, English (and other colonialist languages) brought about a cultural and economic paradigm shift throughout the world.

This is only the beginning part of the article. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.

Muhammad Safeer Awan, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of English
International Islamic University
Islamabad, Pakistan
safeer.awan@iiu.edu.pk

Muhammad Ali, M.Phil., Ph.D. Candidate
Lecturer in English
International Islamic University Islamabad, Pakistan
muhammadalig@gmail.com
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