ORIENTS SOCIAL RESEARCH CONSULTANCY (OSRC) & PAKISTAN LANGUAGES AND HUMANITIES REVIEW (PLHR) adheres to Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial 4.0 International License. The authors submitting and publishing in PLHR agree to the copyright policy under creative common license 4.0 (Attribution-Non Commercial 4.0 International license). Under this license, the authors published in PLHR retain the copyright including publishing rights of their scholarly work and agree to let others remix, tweak, and build upon their work non-commercially. All other authors using the content of PLHR are required to cite author(s) and publisher in their work. Therefore, ORIENTS SOCIAL RESEARCH CONSULTANCY (OSRC) & PAKISTAN LANGUAGES AND HUMANITIES REVIEW (PLHR) follow an Open Access Policy for copyright and licensing.
How to Cite
African American Vernacular English (AAVE) and African American Identity in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple: A Stylistic Analysis
Abstract
The objective of the paper at hand is to show Celie (Walker’s protagonist of her novel The Color Purple) as an embodiment of African American identity. The paper explicates that her identity can be explored through her use of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) and departures from the Standard English. The paper aims to establish the link between Celie’s use of AAVE and her African American identity as the major themes of the novel. This is achieved with the help of stylistic analysis of the linguistic evidences from the data novel: The Color Purple basing on the linguistic categories borrowed from Tottie (2002), Rickford and Rickford (2000) and Green (2002). Therefore, the paper designing a grid of linguistic categories of AAVE from the work of the above mentioned linguists locates the examples from the novel and fully showcases Alice Walker’s protagonist Cellie whose identity is found to be marked by her exclusive and persistent use of her African American Vernacular English (AAVE).
Authors
Dr. Aamer Shaheen
Assistant Professor, Department of English Literature, Government College University, Faisalabad, Punjab, Pakistan
Sadia Qamar
Lecturer, Department of English Literature, Government College University, Faisalabad, Punjab, Pakistan
Dr. Muhammad Asif Khan
Assistant Professor, Department of English Literature, The Islamia University of Bahawalpur, Punjab, Pakistan
Keywords
African American Identity, African American Vernacular English (AAVE), Alice Walker, The Color Purple
