The use of non-standard English in West African and Southeast Asian literary texts

What is it about?

We often think of literary texts as written in standard language. However, these texts contain many instances of non-standard language. This article looks at the ways in which authors from West Africa, Southeast Asia, and Scotland use local varieties of English in their texts. It turns out that texts from the three regions use non-standard language very differently, although they do so following a common pattern: pick one major category, such as accent, grammar, or code-switching. The differences arise because authors from each region have picked a different category. Authors from postcolonial varieties of English, in this case West Africa and Southeast Asia, use non-standard language at a similar rate, which is much smaller than for native-speaker Scottish authors. In terms of differences across time, authors tend to change and adapt their writing practices rather than sticking to a stable tradition.

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Why is it important?

So far, most investigations that looked at non-standard language in literary texts were either impressionistic or were restricted to a limited set of texts or a specific region. The present approach is empirical and corpus-based, includes texts from multiple regions, and offers not only analyses between regions, but also looks a variation within regions, both synchronic and diachronic.

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