The pragmatic dimension of creativity in the other tongue

Authors of literature in new Englishes reach out to a multi‐national audience through the conscious choice of English as their medium of presentation. New‐English authors exhibit a range of nativization in their English. They present new elements and structures within a matrix of internationally ‘standard’ English, allowing the reader to accept the presentation in a more or less readable way. Texts may be seen as possessing the qualities of intelligibility, comprehensibility and interpretability. Passages such as “During this time Okonkwo's fame had grown like a bushfire in the harmattan” [Achebe, Things Fall Apart (1958: 7)] are marked for the non‐African reader, but attractive in part because of that. Structures such as “you are a know‐God man be” [Okara, The Voice (1964: 30)] are at an extreme of the cline of acceptability for most readers, and such texts raise the question of what the limits of ‘Englishness’ are. This study explores various pragmatic dimensions of creativity in selected contexts of English in the Outer Circle.