Global Languages in the Time of the Opium Wars: The Lost Idioms of Amitav Ghosh's Sea of Poppies

Lise Guilhamon (1)

1 SUDS - Suds d'Amériques, Espaces Atlantiques

Amitav Ghosh's Sea of Poppies (2008) embarks the reader on a linguistic adventure to explore the languages and idioms which were in use at the time of the First Opium War in South Asia (1839-1842). The novel revives two idiolects which are now extinct, Laskari and the Anglo-Indian idiom, to show that the process of deterritorialization of English, which we tend to think of as an essentially contemporary phenomenon, actually has its roots in the past. This paper will attempt to disentangle these roots and situate these global idioms within the poetics of the novel and its paratextual apparatus.

Mots clés: langue mondiale; Poétique de la langue

Mots clés: Diaspora; deterritorialization; global language; Poetics of language

Domaines: Linguistique

Lise Guilhamon. Global Languages in the Time of the Opium Wars: The Lost Idioms of Amitav Ghosh's Sea of Poppies. Commonwealth Essays and Studies, 2011, 34 (1), pp.67-76. ⟨halshs-00696067⟩