Augustine Uka Nwanyanwu

Achebe’s work is anchored within concrete historical circumstances, and language forms the core of his narrative style. The underlying thesis of this study is that there is a dialectical interrelation between language and ideological position taken by the characters in Achebe’s fiction. Because the work is concerned with the way linguistic structures manifest world-view, Sociolinguistic Functional Stylistics (SFS) provides useful insights in the study of the ideological spheres in Achebe’s novel. Very few scholars have examined the implications of language in the perspectives of characters in Achebe’s fiction, and leaving this question of the role of language in world-view unresolved. Thus, the issue of language and the way it implicates differing power relationships remains problematic.