Appropriation of Nigerian English in Selected Novels Ofadimora-Ezeigbo and Chimamanda Adichie

Abstract

The fluxional nature of language in contemporary Nigerian literature shows that literary works have been marked by a circuitous and revolving paradigm of intertextuality. The creative writers in this milieu have revealed the interrelationship between Nigerian English and Nigerian literature on the one hand, and the creative expression of the language viz-a-viz the cultural and linguistic identity of the Nigerian people. This paper attempts to ascribe a presumption that there is a deliberate attempt by the Nigerian novelist to provide a trajectory for a higher level of engagement following the domestication process. This work establishes that the deployment of indigenous linguistic elements by the selected contemporary Nigerian novelists has shown that the English language can be affable, malleable and adaptable in the accommodation of the thoughts, fancy, intents purpose and reality of the Nigerian culture. This paper adopted the postcolonial theory of Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffin and Tiffin Helen (1989). Their postulation is premised on the notions of 'defamiliarization and literariness’ through a deliberate subversion of the conventional literary form. Findings revealed that multiple linguistic and discursive alliances dominate the works of the selected writers. It suggests that the author's deployment of glossing, untranslated words, inter-language syntactic fusion, code-switching and vernacular in the novels of Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo and Chimamanda Adichie is aimed at achieving aesthetic ambience and intertextual correlation. It then concludes that the appropriation of the English Language in the Nigerian fictional space offers an alternative discourse to the adopted British English imposed as a result of the historical reality of the Nigerian people.