TEARING DOWN THE EMPIRE’S LANGUAGE: POSTCOLONIAL LINGUISTICS STRATEGIES IN THE WEARY GENERATION

Abstract

During the process of colonizing, the British government used the English language as a state apparatus to control the natives and their education system. Abrogation and appropriation are the two postcolonial strategies used by the writers of the suppressed nation to express their feelings and emotions in a literary work (Ashcraft et al., 2002). The author, Abdullah Hussain, demonstrates the social and cultural realities of Pakistani culture through the use of abrogation and appropriation. The researcher has used the above-mentioned linguistic strategies of abrogation and appropriation by Kachru (1983) and Ashcraft et al. (2002). Kachru (1983) categorizes the techniques of appropriation, such as translation equivalence, contextual redefinition or kinship words, lexical innovations, and indigenous discourse markers or tag switching. Meanwhile, Ashcraft et al. ’s (2002) techniques consist of five main categories, namely glossing, syntactic fusion, interlanguage, untranslated words, and code-switching. Furthermore, the results of the data analysis show that the researcher has identified a new strategy in the novel, which is a kind of local proverb.