Negotiating Linguistic Boundaries: Language Appropriation in Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner

Abstract

The current study attempts to investigate the language-appropriation strategies in post-colonial Afghan-American authors particularly in Khaled Hosseini’s novel The Kite Runner. Appropriation is the act of adopting another culture and language by modifying it to your own goals and requirements. This method is generally used by post-colonial writers who appropriate English in their literary works due to resistance or/and necessity. During the colonization, the colonizer suppressed all other native languages. They employed the English language as a tool to exercise control in establishing a system of authority based on linguistic dominance. Nevertheless, the writers of the post-colonial era have stood against this dominant force of colonial language and undermined it by implementing different strategies into their own social and cultural context. Various language appropriation techniques are used to investigate the data from this research as recommended by Kachru (1983) and Ashcroft, Griffith, and Tiffin (2002). Findings from the investigation revealed that the language appropriation techniques of glossing, untranslated words, code-switching, lexical innovation, rhetorical and functional styles, translation equivalence, and contextual redefinition have been employed in the text. Among them, glossing, untranslated words, and code-switching are utilized frequently. The strategy of interlanguage has not been utilized by the author in the novel. The study contributes to broader discussions on language appropriation, cultural representation, and decolonization in contemporary literary discourse.