engleski

#Dahl100: The Master of Childlike Language

Roald Dahl’s number one children's texts represent the most prominent example of childlike language (Flegar 2015) that has been produced by popular adult authors of children’s texts for almost two centuries. As a specific type of literary discourse, childlike language is marked by various linguistic deviations, including the semiotic as defined by Julia Kristeva, as well as its neologistic quality related to Bakhtin's concept of the carnivalesque, which is further explored by John Stephens in Language and Ideology in Children’s Fiction (1992). The playful and subversive usage of onomatopoeia and sound patterns, puns, riddles, orthographic alterations, portmanteau words, nonsense, hyperbole, or neologisms characteristic of popular children’s authors from Lewis Carroll to J. K. Rowling are all most superbly exemplified in the writing of Roald Dahl. Perhaps owing to his bilingual upbringing, Dahl perceived the linguistic sign as arbitrary and relished in playing with form and content. This vividness, quality and vulgarity of Dahl’s childlike language contributes to the humour, the grotesque nature and the uniqueness of his expression, resulting in, for example, the invention of an entirely new language, Gobblefunk, and the current publication of the Oxford Roald Dahl Dictionary (2016). Because of Dahl’s specific treatment of language, we might consider him the champion of modern childhood, for his writing constitutes the absolute empowerment of a modern child reader. Though Dahl tampers to a much greater extent with language and the written word in his children’s writing, childlike language is also present in his cross-over fiction and fiction for adults by way of exaggeration and aberration from the norm. Ultimately, Dahl’s childlike language is the reason for the adaptability of his children’s works on stage and screen, and will in all likelihood contribute to the endurance of his writing for thousands of centuries to come.

childlike language, the semiotic, the carnivalesque, deviation from the norm, word play, hyperbole, nonsense, neologism

Rad je znanstveni objavljen na popularnoj web platformi Wales Arts Review u sklopu međunarodnog znanstvenog skupa Roald Dahl Centenary Cardiff Conference