The African Novel in English: A Sociolinguistic Study

Abstract

The African novel in English reflects the African cultural richness and diversity. It displays the beauty of African traditions and it is considered as a means to rectify the misconceptions and the common stereotypes about the Dark Continent. Since the African novel in English is the product of the African social reality, its language constructs a controversial topic in the African literary scene. The use of English forms a rhetoric device in the Anglophone African fiction. It is affected by different social variables in African societies such as gender, social class, ethnicity and age, and it is nativized to convey African cultural traditions. For that reason, the present thesis comes to investigate the nature of English language in Chinua Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanh. It seeks to determine the features of English nativization and the way sociolinguistic variables shape its use in the target novels. Thus, the descriptive method and the sociolinguistic framework are adopted to describe the way language is nativized and affected by different sociolinguistic variables and to clarify the meaning of certain linguistic units in their context. Chinua Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah reflect the African social authenticity in post-colonial and contemporary periods. The analysis of the two target novels reveals the role of sociolinguistic variables such as gender, social class, ethnicity in the English variation in literature. It displays the main features of English nativization such as proverbs, idioms, code switching, English pidgin and neologism that construct a new English variety and create an authentic literary genre.