Post-colonial Creativity in Language and Cultural Constructions

Railway Discourse in South Asian Englishes

Abstract

This paper investigates the effects of post-colonial creativity on language use, especially at lexico-morphological and metaphorical levels, by focusing on railway discourse in South Asian Englishes, with special reference to Indian English and Pakistani English. Rather than merely adopting the constraints of technical language, the lexis of railway discourse constitutes a significant linguistic domain, in which constructions and devices emerge from various productive processes including vocabulary fossilisation (e.g. obsolete items derived from Victorian English), lexical shift (the extension of standard meaning) and semantic expansion (via borrowing or code-mixing with reference to local languages). The paper draws on both published sources as well as authentic materials (the websites of the Indian and Pakistani railway companies). Following Yamuna Kachru and Larry Smith’s contention that literary works in English “are a valuable source of sociocultural knowledge not easily recoverable from grammars, dictionaries and textbooks”, I shall also expand my scope and briefly discuss the phenomenon of post-colonial creativity for railway discourse in literary texts as well, given the paramount importance and sociocultural connotations of the train in various South Asian narrative contexts.