Role of Code-Switching and Code-Mixing in Indigenous Communicative Contexts: A Study of The God of Small Things

Abstract

Communicative strategies like code-switching and code-mixing have interested researchers the world over. These strategies have traversed from real life situations to creative writings to social networking domains and are dominant in bilingual or multi-lingual societies for multifarious reasons. While majority of the research was conducted in the spoken form from the real-life contexts, a few were directed towards the written forms in literary genres and computer-mediated communication. However, a significant gap becomes noticeable and needs to be explored in Indian English fiction where creative writers have dexterously used these communicative strategies. Keeping the above in mind, the present paper attempts to analyze the role of these strategies in indigenous interpersonal communicative contexts in Indian English fiction. The text chosen for this purpose is Arundhati Roy's TheGod o Small Things and the analysis is based on the grammatical and pragmatic explanation of indigenous words which mostly belong to the area of interpersonal communication. The study shows how the author has skillfully used these strategies to unravel the indigenous cultural and social customs and mindset of the people within a particular indigenous community as well as the role-relationship between the interlocutors in a particular communicative context.

Social Relation that Triggers the Use of Code-Switching in the Novel the Architecture of Love by Ika Natassa

“…For example, in the research by Akhtar et al (2020), the author (Mohammed Hanif) of the novel Our Lady of Alice Bhatti portrays the social identities of the community through the use of Urdu words in English novels. Similarly, Mukherjee and Mohanty (2020) have also discovered the social relations and identities of the interlocutors (the characters) in the novel The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy through the code-switching interactions between Malayalam and English. Similarly, Husayn (2020) has discovered that the reason for the characters' codeswitching is to express their linguistic identity.…”