Language, Identity, and Cultural Negotiation in Multilingual Literary Narratives

Abstract

This study examines how multilingual literary narratives use language variation to position identity and negotiate cultural authority across colonial contexts. A comparative qualitative content analysis was conducted on four colonial-era novels: Marah Rusli’s Sitti Nurbaya and Marco Kartodikromo’s Student Hidjo from the Dutch East Indies, and Rudyard Kipling’s Kim and E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India from British India. The analysis covered 80 multilingual episodes, with 20 episodes selected from each novel and coded according to structural form, identity function, cultural domain, and reader accommodation. Embedded lexical items represented 37.5% of the episodes, while honorific or title insertions accounted for 26.2%, making these the two most frequent structural forms. Colonial status or power was the most frequent identity function at 30.0%, followed by cultural belonging at 21.2%, while Indonesian narratives showed greater emphasis on education and mobility and Anglo-Indian narratives showed greater representation of religion and community. Reader accommodation was selective, with 38.8% of episodes leaving marked expressions without gloss or explicit explanation. The findings indicate that multilingualism operates as a narrative distribution of social knowledge, positioning characters through institutional power, cultural affiliation, mobility, solidarity, and resistance while regulating readers’ access to culturally marked meanings.