A Sociolinguistic Approach to Chinua Achebe's Novels

Chinua Achebe is Africa's best conscious experimenter of the English language. His major success lies in the bold experimentation with the English language adapted to reflect a truly West African consciousness and sensibility. His style is grounded in cross-fertilization of both indigenous Ibo and Western elements. He solves the problem of how one indicates the speech styles of Ibo characters, all of whom must use English. His techniques involve direct borrowing of Igbo lexicons or cushioning and calquing, especially of Igbo idioms and proverbs. He also utilizes various modes of narrative which underline his technique of speech stratification to portray the different varieties of English used in a multilingual urban community. His style ranges from Standard English to Pidgin, a contact language and urban lingua franca. Speech patterns of urban characters reflect some sociolinguistic phenomena of code-switching, code-mixing and interlarded speech. In his novels, Achebe attains an impressive range of style which contributes to a realistic presentation of characters and themes.