CULTURE-SPECIFIC LEXIS IN KASHMIRI ENGLISH FICTION: A CORPUS-BASED STUDY OF THE HALF MOTHER

Abstract

This article investigates culture-specific vocabulary in Kashmiri English fiction through a 50 000-word corpus compiled from Shahnaz Bashir’s novel The Half Mother. The corpus was analysed in AntConc (v4.x) using wordlists, keyword extraction with log-likelihood (LL) statistics, and 2–5-gram cluster analysis. A 156 264-word British English fiction corpus (Tess of the d’Urbervilles) served as the reference. The analysis reveals a stable set of lexical items denoting kinship, honorifics, and material culture such as traditional clothing, cuisine, and domestic artefacts. High normalised frequencies and very large LL values provide quantitative evidence of lexical nativisation, showing that Kashmiri English expresses local identity through an embedded cultural vocabulary.