‘We are divided people, aren't we?’ The politics of multicultural language and dialect crossing in Zadie Smith's White Teeth

Abstract

This article applies a literary sociolinguistic reading to Zadie Smith's White Teeth by employing linguist Ben Rampton's findings on language crossing. I argue that the majority of Smith's characters do not have access to the multiculturalism that many scholars and critics see in the text. As a result, some of the novel's most prominent examples of language crossing involve Bengali, Jamaican, and even first-generation English characters crossing over into languages other than their own in an attempt to perform identity and to negotiate community boundaries. I ultimately show that the moments of language crossing within the novel are indeed limited to a prescribed set of conditions and choreographed social interactions, and, as such, the novel confirms Rampton's findings: that ethnicity seems to be something that continually informs our social reality, and it is thus improper to view language crossing as a force capable of deconstructing ethnicity.