Sociolinguistic aspects of meaning in Kofi Awoonor’s, This Earth, My Brother... (1971) and Comes the Voyager at Last (1992)

Abstract

Sociolinguistics concerns with how language use is governed by factors such as age, class, gender, race, and the like. It is used to investigate the form and use of language in different cultures, and to what extent the development of language has been influenced by cultural environment. Studies have investigated language forms in markets, schools and different aspects of societies but we are bereft of how this concept is represented in interactions of characters in literary texts. This study thus, does a Sociolinguistic Investigation of Kofi Awoonor’s two novels ‘This Earth, My Brother…’ and ‘Comes the Voyager at Last’; texts that have been found to be underexplored in terms of systematic studies, in order to determine how sociolinguistic factors impinge on language choice and use, and also enhance comprehension of the texts. Sociolinguistic aspects of age, sex, status and educational attainment were used as the theoretical parameters of determining how characters in the texts used language forms. Findings revealed that the kind of language people use is determined by where and to whom they are engaged with in the interaction(s). Thus, this study affirms that the society/environment one finds oneself impinges on the form or type of language one uses.