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• W7461108 abstract "WHEN CHINUA ACHEBE wrote, in 1964, that the English he and other Afro-English writers use have to be a new English [...] altered to suit its new African surroundings,1 he did so in order to defend his use of English. The language debate, which never seems to abate, is, however, not the issue here, but how anglophone African writers have responded to Achebe's appeal for an africanization of English. Here I shall use the linguistic term 'nativization', as anglophone writers from India also shall be discussed. My use of the term will not correspond to the most common definition, which has to do with the process of how a language gains native speakers. Instead, it has to do with the import of language material from indigenous languages into English.2An appeal like Achebe's is also found in India. In a celebrated foreword to his first novel, Kanthapura, in 1938, Raja Rao wrote:We cannot write like the English. We should not. We cannot write only as Indians. [...] Our method of expression therefore has to be a dialect which will some day prove to be as distinctive and colourful as the Irish or the American.3Rao is more cautious than his Nigerian colleague. The thirty-odd years that separate the statements may, of course, have something to do with this difference. India was still a British colony, and perhaps Rao felt he had to be on his guard for that reason. Achebe certainly did not have to consider this, as Nigeria had been independent for four years when he first spoke these words at a conference in 1964. However, it is more likely that the global politicocultural climate was altered, also in the Commonwealth, by the middle of the 1960s.It is, of course, not only the difference in these appeals that has made AfroEnglish writers more prone to radically nativize their English than their IndoEnglish colleagues. In the following, it is this varying degree of nativization that shall be examined. The novel is the prime focus, as the linguistic differences are more apparent and exciting here. Why is it that anglophone writers in Africa nativize the English language more than Indian writers? Why do not Indo-English writers experiment linguistically with their mother tongues as tiie Africans do? In the following I will speculate on possible reasons, as well as establishing the difference by way of illustration.I begin with Rao and Achebe. In his first novel, Rao has a female raconteur telling about the struggle for independence in her village, Kanthapura. Her voice is clearly oral; her narration is direct address of a fictive listener. This is how the novel begins:Our village - I don't think you have ever heard about it - Kanthapura is its name, and it is in the province of Kara. High on the Ghats is it, high up the steep mountains that face the cool Arabian seas, up the Malabar coast is it.4Even if the pronominal address rarely returns, the oral style is intended to create an oral storytelling situation. Nativization of the English is found chiefly in the imagery, where Rao allows the Kannada language and Kanthapura to colour the English. Meenakshi Mukheijee is one critic who has paid attention to how Rao translates expressions literally from Kannada into English5: Postman Subbayya, who had no fire in his stomach and was red with red and blue with blue, comes running.. .6If we compare this with Achebe, it is clear that the Nigerian has gone fiirther. In his third novel, Arrow of God (1964), it reads like this when the village priest decides to send one of his sons to the white people's church:I want one of my sons to join these people and be my eye there. If there is nothing in it you will come back. But if there is something there you will bring home my share. The world is like a mask dancing. If you want to see it well you do not stand in one place.7The priest closes with a proverb, particularly common in oral traditions all over Africa, something this Achebe novel is so rich in that it is sometimes referred to as a collection of proverbs. …" @default.
• W7461108 created "2016-06-24" @default.
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• W7461108 date "2013-01-01" @default.
• W7461108 modified "2023-09-24" @default.
• W7461108 title "“But it will have to be a new English”: A Comparative Discussion of the ‘Nativization’ of English among Afro- and Indo-English authors" @default.
• W7461108 doi "https://doi.org/10.1163/9789401209892_018" @default.
• W7461108 hasPublicationYear "2013" @default.
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