Beyond Borders: Translingual Hybridity in Contemporary Anglophone Literature

Abstract

Amidst rising globalization and a trend towards cultural convergence, Anglophone space and place of literature has been a dynamic location for linguistic innovation. One of the phenomena of translingual hybridity disrupts diagnostic linguistic boundaries by combining two or more languages in English-dominant texts. But the scholarship has typically concentrated on the bilingual or the postcolonial language politics, while the hybrid, fluidy linguistic practices of the contemporary writers were under-explored. This thesis seeks to find out how translingual hybridity works in such literature of today as the means for formation of identity, opposition, and narrative experiment. It explores ways through which authors write with hybrid language practices, illustrating the complexities of multicultural and diasporic experiences outside and across traditional national or linguistic borders. As part of a qualitative, comparative literary analysis, the present study considers a curated choice of contemporary Anglophone novels and short stories by transnational authors. Close textual reading is accompanied by conceptual lenses from translingualism, postcolonial studies, and sociolinguistics to be able to notice patterns of linguistic hybridisation and cultural negotiation. Some preliminary analysis indicates that translingual hybridity challenges monolingual expectation not only, but constructs new narrative voices that resonate with diasporic realities. Such themes are expressed by writers through strategic use of code-switching, untranslated words and syntactic innovation. These texts reconstruct English as a space of changeability of language, not a colonial or dominant monolith. The results emphasize the value placed on translingual hybridity as a literary strategy that captures and re-configures cultural identity in global settings. This research advances the ambit of Anglophone literary studies by emphasizing the creative power of linguistic fluidity and the imperative to re-examine categorization of works of literature along metric of terminology or nationhood.