The challenge of linguistic-cultural hybridity in P. Grace's short stories

The paper looks at a number of Grace's stories from the perspectives of language contact and cultural hybridity. In particular, it considers how English is transformed into a writer's idiolect when it is confronted with a Maori lexical and morpho-syntactic substratum. The analysis of linguistic phenomena regarding 'appropriated' English reveals a gradual change in contents and ideological political orientation in the three collections under investigations (Waiariki, Dream Sleepers and Electric City). A shift is observed from the celebration without sentimentalism of Maori traditions, beliefs and social structures in a rural context, to an awareness of their displacement as a result of urbanization, to the final inevitable relocation in and often painful adjustment of Maori people to the pakeha city world. In Grace's stories hybridity is the outcome of cultural-linguistic 'appropriation' that is used to unveil areas of Otherness.