ENGC70H3 Lecture Notes - Lecture 12: Sam Selvon, The Lonely Londoners, One Story
Document Summary
The characters are speaking in fluent english, but are portrayed through broken orthography to show their accent. It breaks the rules of written english - it is not broken/second-language english. It"s the english that developed in the west indies; it follows it"s own rules. What"s startling is having this form of english being written as though it is being spoken to you - spoken form of english. While in school, newspapers, books, etc. these characters would have been taught in standard. No one speaks like a book, and all of us speak with accents and patterns much different from written english - oral english is for everybody, but grammatical, written english must be learned. Selvon"s novel moves in the way of spoken english. Developed with an african grammar and english words. Everyone in the world speaks a dialect - but dialects are only heard orally. There"s a standard form of written english.
