Language variation in diasporic texts: transparency or opacity?

This paper will examine the dialectic relationship between the saliency of linguistic varieties in discourse and their transparency. Transparency is here understood as the ease of access to semantic, pragmatic, cultural information. Diatopic, diastratic and diaphasic varieties are easily perceived but they are not necessarily easily understood. Their relative opacity or resistance to interpretation lies in the temptation that the reader experiences to construct alterity in reference to the self or sameness. Linguistic varieties will be apprehended through the study of code-switching in fictional texts that are not meant to be a faithful representation of reality but to be imaginary representations of subjects.The approach developed in this paper lies on the study of postcolonial texts published in English: Girls at War and other stories by Chinua Achebe (1972) and Jagua Nana by Cyprian Ekwensi (1961).