Silencing the Mother Tongue Language Flattening and Identity Loss in Exit West

In an era of intensified global circulation, contemporary fiction often grapples with the politics of language, identity, and translatability. This article explores how Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West employs a deliberate strategy of language flattening, a stylistic choice that eschews code-switching, idiomatic texture, and vernacular richness to produce a smooth, globally legible prose. Grounded in postcolonial language politics and postmonolingual theory, this study offers a close, qualitative reading of the novel. Rather than viewing linguistic omission as neutral, the analysis interprets it as a politically meaningful act that complicates the critical tendency to equate multilingualism with resistance. The paper adopts a single-text case study approach and concludes by proposing language flattening as a useful lens for analyzing style in other transnational Anglophone texts and suggests avenues for future comparative and reader-response research.