English and the postcolonial writer's burden: Linguistic innovations in Femi Fatoba's My 'Older' Father and Other Stories

Abstract

In a situation where two or more languages and cultures are in contact, there is bound to be linguistic and cultural interference. This is the situation with African literature of English expression where important socio-cultural habits and traits are expressed in a foreign language. Based exclusively on the examples from Femi Fatoba's My 'Older' Father and Other Stories (1997), this paper attempts to examine how a postcolonial writer has appropriated and reconstituted the English language in his texts through some linguistic processes which include loan words, loan coinages, loan blends, pidginization, code switching and the like. Fatoba strives to find a solution to the problem of bilingualism/biculturalism in his text by relying heavily on the domestication of the imported tongue. The paper observes that although Fatoba has deviated linguistically from Standard English, in the text, he has not falsified the tradition he has transformed into the English language. Rather, he has...