Translingualism in Patrick Chamoiseau’s masterpiece Texaco

Abstract

Translinguism is one of the most relevant characteristics of postcolonial literature. In this paper, my aim is to describe and analyze some samples of this pervasive phenomenon in Patrick Chamoiseau’s novel Texaco (1992). The story takes place in Martinique, a former French Colony and nowadays a French Overseas Department. Translinguism appears in a written document when two or more languages coexist, one being the dominant and the other a minority language. More specifically it is “the purposive and artful reproduction within one language of features from another language” (Scott, 1990: 75). In the case of Texaco although written in French, the presence of Créole permeates the novel and leaves fingerprints in syntax, semantics, morphology and pragmatics. The overall result is a very rich linguistically hybrid text in which the risk of incommunicability is somehow present.