Non-native Speech in English Literature

Book excerpt: Foreign accents in fiction are a common stylistic instrument of marking a character as the ‘Other’ and conveying national stereotypes in literature. This study investigates in a qualitative analysis the linguistic characteristics of non-native fictional speech, with a specific focus on the English Renaissance, the Victorian Age and the 20th-century war decades. After examining the concept of national identity and the image of the foreigner in these eras, the study undertakes an in-depth linguistic analysis of a literary corpus of drama and prose. Recurring patterns in non-native fictional speech are uncovered and set into relation with the socio-cultural background of the respective work, which leads to intriguing findings about the changing image of the foreigner and the phenomenon of linguistic stereotying in English literature.