Cultural Identity through Afghan and Islamic Lexical Items in Khaled Hosseini's Fiction

A Sociolinguistic and Literary Study of The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns

Abstract

 Cultural identity in literature is often constructed through words, images, and cultural references embedded within a text, enabling readers to recognize the cultural identity of both the author and the setting.

     This study examines how Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner (2003) and A Thousand Splendid Suns (2007) draw upon a dense lexicon of Afghan and Islamic terms to construct and negotiate cultural identity for a global, English-reading audience.

     Adopting a qualitative, corpus-informed textual-analysis method framed by Kachru's (1986, 1990) theory of nativization, Bakhtinian heteroglossia, and Stuart Hall's model of cultural identity as positioning, the study catalogues and classifies forty-three untranslated or lightly glossed Dari, Pashto, and Arabic items recurring across the two novels, addressing a gap in existing scholarship on Hosseini's fiction.

     Findings indicate that these lexical items function as markers of ethnographic authenticity, sites of resistance to the flattening of Afghan identity, and anchors of religious-moral meaning, as with watan against "homeland" or nang and namoos against "honor." Religious lexis such as namaz, zakat, Inshallah, and Mashallah interacts with ethnic-national lexis such as Pashtun, Hazara, and Kochi, together producing a layered devotional-ethnic identity that survives displacement and migration.