She deviates from the standard conventions of the English language by using regional words and sentences, unusual capital letters, italics, sentences without subjects, misspellings, one-word sentences and abnormal word order in The God of Small things (2001, p.4). Prabhavati avers that the beauty of Roy’s novel lies in the use of Indian English and the verities of her innovative techniques. She has toyed with the standard rules and then spiced it with Malayam flavor. The style she has presented in her debut novel is predominantly different from British or American rules of syntax.

Roy has successfully juxtaposed the theme of resentment towards social constraints, conventions and taboos with her rejection of standard rules of established varieties of the English Language and as Jadoon, Naeem Khan, asserts Roy’s linguistic inventiveness in The God of Small Things clearly indicates that it’s quite possible to break up the Standard English into pieces and then put it back together vernacularly (2017, p.7). James Wood claims that, the greatest pleasure of The God of Small Things lies in its language, which makes the novel a playfield of linguistic innovations (James, 1997, p.32). Her experiment of breaking the conventions and trial of creating the strands of language at the grammatical as well as phonological level opened the floodgates of appreciation as well as criticism from all corners of the literary world. The linguistic advancement of Arundhati Roy’s writings would take her down the annals of history as one of the classical writers of the Post-Colonial era. Key Words: syntactic fusion, code-switching, glossing, regional language, inter-language expressions, un-translated words Linguistic Innovation

Due to the emergence of stylistics as a field of applied linguistics, literary texts can be explored for linguistic patterning and the present study aims to look closely at the fabric of the text to investigate the choice of diction the novelist made to present her saga. The dynamic handling of syntactic fusion, code-switching, use of regional language, inter-language expressions, glossing, usage of short sentences, neologism make God of Small Things a representative text of stylistic innovation. Arundhati Roy’s casting of linguistic and stylistic frenzy in her debut novel God of Small Things paved the way to establish her reputation as one of the celebrated writers of the twenty-first century as the novel successfully grabbed Booker Prize in 1997.

The god of small things writer