Code switching in Ahdaf Soueif's The Map of Love

Abstract

This article examines the phenomenon of code switching in The Map of Love (1999) by the Egyptian—British writer Ahdaf Soueif. Though she chooses English as a medium for her creative expression, Soueif deploys Arabic in her narrative to represent different aspects of the linguistic and cultural norms of Egyptian society. The article's methodology is informed by Kachru's framework on contact literature and his categorization of the occurrence of literary code switching or bilingual creativity into different strategies that encompass cultural and linguistic processes. The results indicate the predominance in The Map of Love of the discourse strategies of employing lexical borrowing, culture-bound references and translational transfer. Finally, the article analyzes the functional motivation of code switching in the postcolonial context of the novel and how the use of certain creative strategies might enhance or diminish the narrative's effectiveness and readability.

Chinese‐Australian cultural conceptualisations of ancestor worship, death and family

“…The emergence of varieties of Englishes being legitimately used in daily communication and adopted in literatures written in those varieties has led to scholars suggesting that writers should find their own written style to express their worldviews unhindered by imperialistic notions of language ownership (Achebe, 1965;Jin, 2010;Parthasarathy, 1987). Other studies examined the transcultural creativity of speech acts in non-native fiction written in English (Albakry & Hancock, 2008;Bamiro, 2011;Bennui, 2013;D'souza, 1991), use of proverbs and metaphor as linguistic strategies (Bamiro, 2011;Zhang, 2002), and cultural influences on nativised poetry in Yoruba (Osakwe, 1999). As of present, studies predominantly examine linguistic strategies from Expanding or Outer Circle literatures written in and authorial voices in their selected texts.…”

“…There are many studies on contact literatures from Kachru's Outer and Expanding Circles, but few studies on texts from the Inner Circle. For example, there are the studies that examine Ha Jin's works (Ibáñez, 2016;Zhang, 2002), Arabic borderland literature (Albakry & Hancock, 2008;Albakry & Siler, 2012), and others from the Outer and Expanding Circle to name a few (Bamiro, 2006(Bamiro, , 2011Bennui, 2013;Bennui & Hashim, 2014;Hashim & Bennui, 2013;Osakwe, 1999). There are also no studies as yet which examine the linguistic diversity of multicultural Australian literature from a world Englishes and cultural linguistics perspective.…”

Mind the gap: What code-switching in literature can teach us about code-switching

“…First, postcolonial and migrant contexts are well represented in studies of conversational CS, thus facilitating comparisons between these two modalities. Second, language itself is often a central theme in postcolonial and migrant literature – one that helps authors to explore issues such as cultural loss and the emergence of hybrid linguistic identities, which are also topics of interest to sociolinguists (Albakry and Hancock, 2008).…”

Identity Construction through Code-switching: An Analysis of Novel How It Happened by Shazaf Fatima Haider

“…

This paper investigates the various societal values and designs for which code-switching, hybridization and echo words are employed by the characters of Shazaf Fatima Haider's novel How it Happened. A methodological framework for this investigation has been adapted from Coulmas (2005), Myers-Scotton (1993; 1996;2006), Albakray andHancock (2008), andThornborrow (2004). The results reveal that code-switching is a purposive and preconceived literary device employed by the bilingual author to show the construction and depiction of various cultural, social and religious identities and acculturation.

…”