Postcolonial Discourse and Language Politics: A Linguistic Analysis of English Literary Texts

Abstract

The corpus of the postcolonial English literature that has been created at South Asia is a linguistically and ideologically complex space, living with the remnants of the colonial subjection still bound to the modern struggles over identity and power conditioning and representational measures. Brought in traditionally as the lingua franca of colonial rule and cultural control, English continues to play a confusing role in the postcolonial environment, as both a medium of interaction with the outside world and a remnant of colonial oppression. The current investigation is a review and critique of postcolonial discourse and language politics that deconstructs the chosen English literary texts by these writers: Chinua Achebe, Hanif Kureishi and Mohsin Hamid. The article uses postcolonial theory, Critical Discourse Analysis, and sociolinguistic approach to examine how the following writers steal English and transform it through the practices defined as code switching, creating lexicons, syntactic deviation, and narrative transformations. It is hypothesized that South Asian and Pakistani writers take an action to transform the English language to indicate resistance, hybridity and localized identities, therefore, challenging the concept of linguistic imperialism and undermining the dominance of standardized English.