Braj Kachru on mixed-language literature

Here are three slides from a lecture by World Englishes guru Braj B. Kachru:

"Contact Literatures in English 

• Result of the contact of English with other languages in multilingual and multicultural context like in the case of Africa and Asia.
• The contact varieties, as time passes, acquire stable characteristics in their pronunciation, syntax, vocabulary and discoursal and style strategies.
• Long-term contact results in Nativisation and Acculturation.

• Nativisation
• Refers to the process which creates a localized linguistic identity of a variety
• Acculturation
• Gives English distinct and local cultural identities. 

"Such writing can be found in South Asia, West Africa, the  Philippines and Southeast Asia.

"Three facts on the Bilingual’s Creativity in English 

• The institutionalized nonnative varieties have an educated variety and a cline of sub-varieties.
• Writers in contact literature in English engage in lectal mixing
• In such writing, there are style-shifts which are related to the underlying sociolinguistic and cultural context

"The result of such style-shifts, appropriate to non-Western contexts, is new discourse strategies, use distinctly different speech acts, and development of new registers in English.

"Issue’s on the Bilingual’s Creativity in English 

• Question of language deficiency vs. difference
• Recognition of Innovations used for stylistic effect as “foregrounding”
• Recognition of various text types – code mixed or noncode mixed – which  are internationally meant for bilingual readers who share the bilingual’s linguistic repertoire and cultural and literary canon.
• Recognizing functional appropriateness of lacalized sublanguages and registers
• Providing contrastive typologies of linguistic and cultural conventions
• Describing the formal and functional characteristics of bilingual’s language mixing and switching"

I am glad that linguists have raised the bar in their study of multilingual literature.  Linguistics, of course, does not (perhaps cannot) distinguish between the use of different languages in a text because the writer uses different languages outside the text (or in non-imaginative, real life) and the deliberate use of other languages that the writer may or may not actually speak or even know (the latter for aesthetic reasons).  This is an area where we need multilingual literary critics that can spot translingual or interlingual meanings intended or not consciously intended by writers.  (A clear problem in his presentation: a reader or a critic of a multilingual text need not be multilingual, just as a writer of a multilingual text need not be multilingual in real life.  Remember T. S. Eliot's shantih in The Waste Land?)