A Sociolinguistic Study of Conversations in Chinua Achebe’s A Man of the People

Abstract

This paper examines sociolinguistic features of conversational interactions among characters in Achebe’s A Man of the People. The aim is to differ from the largely stylistic examination of the text, and therefore, to study conversations in the mediated arena of literature to see how societal structures and beliefs are projected through the voices of fictive characters. For data, all the conversations in the text were sampled and analysed, using ethnographic theories with particular reference to Hymes’ SPEAKING. Our findings reveal that social and contextual variables such as cultural norms, topics, gender, situational impositions, etc. influence the interactions between and/ or among the characters in the text. These, as our findings reveal, constrain the linguistic choices made by the characters. These social-contextual variables also facilitate readers’ understanding of both the text and the world views advanced by the writer through the voices of the characters. This paper concludes that analyzing literary texts most especially prose works using Hymes’ SPEAKING aids a better understanding of the texts and the world views projected in the texts.

Keywords

• Sociolinguistics
• Ethnography of Communication
• A Man of the People
• texts
• and conversational interactions