As a reader, I’m always fascinated by the way authors use language to convey meaning and emotion. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s 2003 novel Purple Hibiscus is a great example of this. Adichie intersperses Igbo words and expressions throughout the novel, creating a unique and powerful reading experience. This linguistic diversity highlights the close connection between language and culture, and how it can enrich our lives.
Translation can be difficult, as it’s often impossible to capture the exact sense of the original text. Take the French phrase joie de vivre, which can be translated as “joy of living” but doesn’t quite capture the Gallic flavour of the original “joie”. This is why anglophones often borrow the French phrase.
In my upcoming book Words in Collision: Multilingualism in English-Language Fiction, I explore how authors have used language diversity to convey meaning and emotion. In Charlotte Brontë’s novel Shirley, for example, French serves as a means of resistance for the two English protagonists against their patriarchal milieu.
In other works of literature, language clashes are used to represent broader power conflicts. Shakespeare’s play Henry V includes a remarkable amount of French dialogue, which is used to represent a literal war on the battlefield and a figurative war between languages.
In post-colonial literature, linguistic collisions often coincide with political struggles between regimes of European hegemony and decolonizing movements. Arundhati Roy’s 1998 novel The God of Small Things is a great example of this, with English and Malayalam vying for supremacy. Similarly, in Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus, Eugene imposes English speech on his Igbo-speaking Nigerian family, while they resist by speaking Igbo in private.
Sarah Dowling, a comparative literature scholar, studies “translingual poetries” — poetry written in multiple languages “informed by feminist, anti-racist, immigrant rights and Indigenous sovereignty movements”. Dowling argues that monolingualism is an ideology that shapes how we understand ourselves and our units of belonging. This can be seen in the case of Stephen Miller, the architect of Donald Trump’s exclusionary immigration policy, who protested against the presence of Spanish in his Southern California high school.
The emergence of polyglot texts like Julia Alvarez’s 1996 poetry collection The Other Side/El Otro Lado or Quiara Alegría Hudes’s memoir My Broken Language (2021) demonstrate cosmopolitanism rather than insularity. As readers, we should welcome these texts and join the multilingual world to enhance our joie de vivre.
