Abstract
Sociolinguistic treatment of a text, big or small, holds that it is important to relate the study of language to a society because meaning is derived from both the linguistic level and extra-linguistic contexts. This essay analyses how Mbuko Lynn, a Nigerian writer of French expressions, adopts French language in its African local colour or form to display the cultural practices and social values of especially the Hausa people in the play, Chaque Chose En Son Temps, with emphasis on the use of proverbs and code-mixing as elements of literary creation. Through the theoretical framework of Hymes Ethnography of speaking which emphasizes the manipulation of major text-features such as lexical borrowing, lexical adaptation, code-mixing, code switching, transliteration, funny phonological mimicry and other useful sociolinguistic elements, the text is examined. The paper, as its purpose, explains how language usage in a text forms part of the culture of the society which produces the text and by extension, to underscore the fact that the study of a language should be connected to both the linguistic and extra-linguistic realities in an attempt to establish how certain linguistic features can serve to characterize particular social arrangements. The paper concludes that meaning is a product of linguistic factors and extra-linguistic variables.
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