Abdul Wadood Khan
Assistant Professor, Department of English Language and Translation, College of Languages and Translation, King Saud University, Riyadh, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. ORCID : 0000-0003-1077-8361. Email: khanaw2003@gmail.com
Volume 12, Number 5, 2020 I Full Text PDF
DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n5.rioc1s24n7
Abstract
The multicultural novels of Zadie Smith, though fiction, invite linguists’ attention because of the efforts she makes to achieve dialectal and social accuracy. While Smith’s On Beauty (2005) is celebrated for its use of American Black English Vernacular; White Teeth: A Novel (2001) is acclaimed for its use of Cockney, Jamaican Creole, and youth language in London. In this linguistic review of White Teeth, specific features of the characters’ dialects are compared with standard versions of English. The impact of these speech patterns on the larger narrative is discussed. This study focuses especially on verbal inflections in the variety of dialects appropriated in the novel. It reviews the relevant research in the field of linguistic inflections and partial derivations with a view to comparing and contrasting their significance. This paper also debates the efficacy of existing sociolinguistic tools vis-à-vis a linguistically challenging work like White Teeth. The study aims at facilitating a better understanding of the linguistic features in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth and their literary use.
Keywords: Dialect, speech inflections, White Teeth, Zadie Smith