Résumé
Language has been for the most part, the means whereby an individual communicates and asserts his identity and culture. It is for this reason, that colonial powers have often recurred to language assimilation in their attempt to eradicate cultures and reforge identities. In this regard, African-American writers suffered a great deal from such linguistic assimilation. The language of their education was no longer the language of their culture. As a result, in Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o’s words “A new English, still in full communion with its ancestral home but altered to suit new African surroundings” was bound to emerge. This characterized the birth of African-American dialect that was prominently spoken in the South. In this respect, the African-American writer Zora Neale Hurston sought to show through her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God that the African dialect was the “New English” that redefined African culture and identity. She introduces the story of Janie, who is both the narrator and protagonist of the novel, as a woman who seeks to claim her individuality and independence as an African-American woman. To do so, Hurston introduces a peculiar narrative form in which a clear split between the narrator’s standard English literary style contrasts the dialect of the black American south used by Janie and the characters in her community. Using Ngũgĩ’s theory of language, this paper aims to show how language is a tool for self-affirmation and individuality as Hurston endeavors to equalize these different forms of communication by endowing the Black community she seeks to portray in the novel with a literary voice that was previously unrecognized and seen as “unliterary” and not worth listening to.