The Price A World Language In J. M. Synge's Riders To The Sea

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In “The African Writer and the English Language,” Chinua Achebe writes: “The price a world language must be prepared to pay is submission to many different kinds of use.” Would you agree with this claim? Respond on the basis of our discussion of the texts in class so far, paying special attention to Riders to the Sea, A Small Place, and You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town. “I feel that English language will be able to carry the weight of my African experience. But it will have to be a new English, still in full communion with its ancestral home but altered to suit its new African surroundings.” Languages are of a fluid and static nature. They draw from various origins, and grow constantly, changing with trends and tongues. A world language must …show more content…

Mother tongues are so deeply ingrained in a person that it is practically impossible to stop it from interweaving with any second language. It would be quite a feat to be able to express feelings without using words of the very country that evokes these. Though it may be hard to find direct examples in any text or story, the text itself often proves this point. Riders To The Sea by J.M. Synge seems practically illegible because of the strong Irish influence that pervades it so deeply. In A Small Place, the author Jamaica Kincaid conveys her distress over the fact that the natives can only express themselves in the language of those who colonised and suppressed them. This language, however, is still far from perfect. Despite the colonisers intentions and the natives efforts, the resulting language is a love-child of what was and what would have been. As seen in You Can’t Get Lost In Cape Town, the story Bowl Like Hole shows the natives fascination with the colonisers language,followed by the assurance, “I knew that unlike the rest of us it would take her no time at all to say bowl like hole. smoothly, …show more content…

It is not only the universal language that suffers when it crosses spatial bounds but its rules that are constantly bent, twisted and altered with the expansion of geographical areas. The world language, often spread through a forced influence is used as a means of catharsis against itself. Poetry by African authors such as Sipho Sepamla and Karen Press shows that writing can never be devoid of the native influence. The prose of Ama Ata Aidoo’s, Our Sister Killjoy and A Small Place redefine the boundaries of genre. The cathartic nature of both these stories makes it harder for them to be genre-specific. The sprouting of several hybrid languages in the world with English as their basis has managed to redefine the English language with respect to writing styles and vocabulary. Having spread around the world through its colonial influence, the Queen’s English, what is the original language is scarcely known, giving way to the more popular vernaculars such as American English. The world language has been stripped of all conventions, having been ‘chutneyfied’ in the form of Hinglish or the more trending Franglais, a marriage of French and English. The original language has been peppered with

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