Speech Style-Shifts in Chimamanda Adichie’s Americanah

Abstract

This paper examines the use of speech style shifts by interlocutors engaged in dialogues. In verbal discourse interactants employ different speech styles in different situations. This is because no one speaks in exactly the same manner on all occasions. A number of factors inform these shifts in speech style such as the speaker, the addressee, social background of the addressee, the speaker’s relationship to the addressee, social distance, situation and power structure, among other factors. Using Chimamanda Adichie’s Americanah, this study seeks to identify the speech style shifts in the dialogues of the characters and the motivations for the shifts. It also seeks to determine the way the shifts affected the relationships between the characters as well as the power structures that are at play. To achieve these objectives, six sample excerpts purposively selected from the text were used as data while ethnography of communication was used as the theoretical framework. Findings revealed that the different speech style shifts identified were influenced mainly by the situation and social distance.