THE USE OF LANGUAGE AS LOCAL COLOUR IN EYOH ETIM’S MISSED CALLS AND ADORAH NWURAH’S HOUSE WOMAN

This paper examines use of language as local colour in Eyoh Etim's Missed Calls and Adorah Nwurah's House Woman. Previous works have concentrated on local colour in literary works without adequately exploring how the cultural environment influences language use. There is however, need to examine how language is a product of the cultural society of the characters. Thus, this research examines the forms of language used in Eyoh Etim's Missed Calls and Adorah Nwurah's House Woman as they depict local colour. The work employs William Labov's (1966) Variability theory as its theoretical framework. It relies primarily on Etim's Missed Calls and Adorah Nwurah's House Woman. The study identifies deictic elements, mood and transitivity as ways in which language is used to reflect local colour in the texts. Findings also reveal that local colour can be realized through neologism, transliteration, lexical borrowing, code switching and code mixing. Finally, this research concludes that Standard British English has failed to express the Nigerian Cultural artifacts, thus, local colour emerges to express this worldview of the second language users.