English as a Local Language: Post-colonial Identities and Multilingual Practices

by Christina Higgins

Overview

When analyzed in multilingual contexts, English is often treated as an entity that is separable from its linguistic environment. It is often the case, however, that multilinguals use English in hybrid and transcultural ways. This book explores how multilingual East Africans make use of English as a local resource in their everyday practices by examining a range of domains, including workplace conversation, beauty pageants, hip hop and advertising. Drawing on the Bakhtinian concept of multivocality, the author uses discourse analysis and ethnographic approaches to demonstrate the range of linguistic and cultural hybridity found across these domains, and to consider the constraints on hybridity in each context. By focusing on the cultural and linguistic bricolage in which English is often found, the book illustrates how multilinguals respond to the tension between local identification and dominant conceptualizations of English as a language for global communication.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781847691804
Publisher:	Channel View Publications
Publication date:	07/08/2009
Series:	Critical Language and Literacy Studies , #2
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	184
Product dimensions:	5.80(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Christina Higgins is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Second Language Studies, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, Honolulu, USA. Her main areas of interest are the sociopolitics of English as a global language and the sociolinguistics of multilingual societies. She has focused her research in Kenya and Tanzania, where she has investigated how multilingual individuals use English alongside their other languages to produce local and global identifications across domains such as workplace conversation, advertising, popular culture, and HIV/AIDS education.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Multivoiced Multilingualism

I ask myself this question But I don't have the answer The language we Tanzanians speak English-Swahili Let's add Chinese, even We'll keep coming up with names for it – It's currency and status Tanzanians, let's keep adding to Swanglish

Wakilisha, translated lyrics of 'Swanglish'

We do not need our tribal tongues in this age of increased mixed marriages and cosmopolitanism. Yet, English and Kiswahili do not define who we are. Sheng, that blend of many of the languages prevalent in Kenya, is who we are.

John Mugubi, lecturer in the Department of Literature, Kenyatta University, Nairobi

Here, the problem is that many words are African and have been anglicized, anglicized – I should say they are words from here, but they have been postponed. Like in English, the word 'citizen' – you can't say it, you should say ' mwananchi' in a newspaper. We have anglicized it because we understand its meaning. It's been anglicized, so in sum, the standard of English is not the best.

Chief sub-editor of an English-medium newspaper in Dar es Salaam

In most of Britain's former colonies where English was installed as an official language, it is often assumed that English serves to connect local communities with the globalized world. In many nations, however, it is clear that the language of globalization also serves distinctively local needs and is used, in various forms, as a local language among locals. The photograph on the cover of this book illustrates a localized use of English in a suburban area of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, where an enterprising storeowner has named his shop 2PAC STORE, a name which combines the international popularity of deceased US rapper Tupac Shakur with the practical matters of selling rice and beans. The storeowner does not sell music or other retail goods associated with hip hop culture; instead, he markets two staples of many Tanzanians' diets by referring to a globally recognized popular culture icon. This example illustrates how English can serve a local sphere of material consumption through intersecting with a sphere of global cultural production. Moreover, it demonstrates how localized uses of English often creatively mix genres, in this case, popular music and marketing.

Of course, much of the time, localized English involves more than just English. For many multilinguals, English is a component of 'urban vernaculars', or ways of using language that are better described as amalgams rather than as codeswitches between languages (Makoni et al., 2007). These new codes are often characterized by an interplay of local and global cultural references, as in the case of 2PAC STORE, in addition to the creative and skillful use of several languages. For most multilinguals, such language use is part of everyday practice. However, speakers of urban vernaculars are frequently caught in an ideological tension about language and cultural identification that is often articulated through debates about the importance of language purity and mutual intelligibility. The above statements about language in East Africa from pop artists, a university lecturer, and a newspaper editor illustrate the spectrum of attitudes about multilingualism involving English. Some are proponents of linguistic and cultural hybridity, but others lament the loss of language purity and view language mixing as a problem. These contrasting views towards mixed languages relate well to Bakhtin's (1968, 1981, 1984, 1986) conceptualization of language as a socio-historical, multifaceted and dialogical struggle over the meanings of signs, and they raise questions about how these multiple meanings are sorted out among speakers. For example, among the cultural and linguistic bricolage involving the language of the former colonizer, and now the language of a globalizing world, what socio-political meanings emerge? What new forms of meaning are created in localized forms of multilingualism that are not possible in monolingual, center varieties such as British Received Pronunciation (RP), or what Lippi-Green (1997) calls Mainstream United States English (MUSE)? And, to what degree do mixed language forms have validity or mutual understanding among speakers?

In considering the answers to these questions, this book explores the weighty issue of how multilingualism involving English is ordered in post-colonial, globalizing societies. Instead of investigating the linguistic aspects of local forms of English or the effect of English on local languages, my goal here is to develop a framework that theorizes how languages work together in multilingual societies by placing multilingual practices at the theoretical center. As Bakhtin (1981: 293) writes, 'For any individual consciousness living in it, language is not an abstract system of normative forms but rather a concrete heteroglot conception of the world'. Because of its colonial history and its current status as the world's dominant lingua franca, English is a central part of the heteroglossic, or multilanguaged, backdrop in East Africa. Many investigations of language use in Tanzania and Kenya have shown that rather than compartmentalizing their languages into distinct spheres of communication, speakers often take advantage of their multilingual repertoires within single domains of use such as school classrooms (e.g. Batibo, 1995; Brock-Utne, 2002; Muthwii & Kioko, 2004; Rubagumya, 1990, 1994), in casual conversation (Abdulaziz & Osinde, 1997; Blommaert, 1999a, 2005b; Myers-Scotton, 1993a), and in forms of popular culture such as song lyrics (e.g. Githinji, 2006). Of course, this phenomenon is not limited to East Africa since millions of speakers worldwide exploit English to produce different types of hybridization, a 'mixing of various "languages" co-existing within the boundaries of a single dialect, a single national language, a single branch, a single group of different branches or different groups of such branches, in the historical as well as paleontological past of languages' (Bakhtin, 1981: 358–359).

Beyond describing, cataloging and analyzing various types of hybridity, this book argues that we need to pay more attention to the manner in which forms of multilingualism are conditioned (though not determined) by domains of language use. As Chapters 3–6 aim to demonstrate, various forms of English are given different kinds of values depending on where they are used and who uses them with whom. In other words, each domain conditions, and is constituted by, different speech genres (Bakhtin, 1986), and the linguistic aspects of each genre are shaped by the specific nature of that particular sphere of communication. This becomes clear when comparing casual conversation with the domain of beauty pageants in East Africa, for example, as pageant judges and audience members typically only value contestants who speak a kind of English that is very standardized, internationally-recognized and mutually intelligible. This variety does not stray far from 'center' Englishes. However, in domains of casual conversation, popular culture and local commerce, a rather different assortment of Englishes and hybrid languages are allowed and given value. The relationship between domains and legitimate forms of language will be further investigated in this book, and special attention will be paid to the social, economic and political spaces surrounding these languages. As Blommaert et al. explain:

Context (including space) does something to people when it comes to communicating. It organizes and defines sociolinguistic regimes in which spaces are characterized by sets of norms and expectations about communicative behavior – orders of indexicality. Entering such spaces involves the imposition of the sets of norms and rules as well as the invoking of potentially meaningful relations between one scale and another (e.g. the local versus the national or the global). (Blommaert et al., 2005: 203)

A focus on context deemphasizes multilingualism or fluency in English as a property of the individual and reestablishes it more firmly as a property of situations. The domain-based approach to multilingualism taken in this book reveals both the affordances and the limitations that contexts create for various multilingual practices.

Theoretical Contributions of This Book

The main theoretical contribution of this book is to destabilize the dominant conceptualizations of English as a global language by drawing attention to the cultural and linguistic bricolage in which English is often found. This decentering challenges dominant understandings of 'English' as a distinct code, neatly bounded by diglossic language domains, and it problematizes the association of English with the expression of western and/or global cultural references. Hybridized languages often defy linguistic descriptions, as they shift and morph, sometimes into new languages, as speakers use them. They challenge prevailing notions of bilingualism as well, as many hybrid language speakers are not able to separate discrete languages from the spectrum of languages that they speak. Nevertheless, since most of the contexts in which hybrid languages involving English are spoken are also contexts that experienced British colonization, the populations in these settings are often described in reference to their English proficiency in terms like 'English-knowing bilinguals' (Pakir, 1991) the 'outer circle of English' (Kachru, 1986), and speakers of 'local forms of English' (Strevens, 1992). Clearly, references to 'Anglophone Africa' and 'English speaking nations' in the post-colonial world are at odds with the ways hybrid languages involving English are treated in the literature. Though code-switching, localized Englishes and urban vernaculars have been widely analyzed, this scholarship has often been excluded from theoretical discussions of the socio-politics of English as an international language. Scholars who examine the politics of English have advocated for greater consideration of linguistic hybridity as a central aspect of English in the world (cf. Canagarajah, 1999, 2006; Pennycook, 2003a, 2007; Fabrício & Santos, 2006; Makoni, 2003), but this remains a minority perspective in the vast literature on global English. Through a series of ethnographic studies of multilingual practices in East Africa, this book strives to engage with the prominent literature on global English, and to call for greater inclusion of hybrid forms of multilingualism involving English.

In bringing hybrid language practices to the center of discussions about English as a global language, I draw inspiration from Makoni's (1998, 2003; Makoni & Pennycook, 2005) work on the disinvention of languages. Building on Mudimbe's (1988) deconstruction of European categories in scholarship about Africa, Makoni uses this concept to dismantle linguistic boundaries and concepts, and he calls for a reconceptualization of language based on sociolinguistic realities among multilinguals. Makoni (2003) demonstrates how the South African Constitution, which now recognizes 11 official languages, perpetuates the colonial invention of languages such as Xhosa and Zulu by falling prey to the colonial ideology of linguistic fixity. He explains that the colonialists applied their own European worldviews onto African people and their languages, imposing their view of a one-to-one relationship between language and ethnicity. The result was that the interconnectedness of Zulu, Xhosa and other languages in South Africa was ignored, resulting in a false 'boxed' representation of linguistic and ethnic divisions. Hence, current language policy in South Africa is a legacy of the colonialist misrepresentation of the sociolinguistic reality of most Africans. Remarking on the speech of South Africans, Makoni (2003: 143) writes, 'In these urban centers, the "mixed" forms are themselves the linguistic norm, the starting point in the process of language socialization for most people, and at times the only version of language for everyday encounters'. Through describing language as it is used, Makoni asserts that we can develop more grounded starting points for analyzing the socio-politics of English and other languages in the 21st century.

This leads to the second major theoretical contribution of the book, which is to challenge the either/or tendencies that characterize much socio-linguistic research on English as a global language. A fairly identifiable dichotomy has developed that treats English as either an oppressive force or as a creative resource for previously colonized or currently globalizing societies. The 'oppressive' side of this dichotomy is often characterized by a focus on the hegemonic and imperialistic effects of English, and in this literature, historical associations with colonialism are quite prevalent (e.g. Kumaravadivelu, 2006; Phillipson, 1992). The 'creative' side of the dichotomy is occupied by a focus on the localization and appropriation of English in local communities and the types of creative expression that occur, often in hybrid forms (e.g. Bamgbose et al., 1995; Kachru, 1986, 1992a). This body of research generally seeks to redress the strong claims made by those who view English as an imperialistic language through demonstrations of how the language has been altered by speakers around the world and made to fit local contexts and local registers.

A major goal of this book is to show how hybridization challenges both of these theoretical perspectives regarding the socio-politics of English, particularly since neither one can always account for what is found in language use among speakers in post-colonial societies. Instead, I propose that the Bakhtinian concept of multivocality offers a more comprehensive framework for interpreting the hybrid and transcultural language used in such societies. Using this concept, my intention is to show how the co-existence of lingering and recently developed forms of linguistic and cultural imperialism can be analyzed alongside appropriations and localization, and to explore how members of multilingual societies make sense of the linguistic heteroglossia (Bakhtin, 1981) and the multiple of meanings that surround them. The concept of multivocality refers to the several simultaneities that English can index in post-colonial and multilingual societies, including the dual nature of English as an imperialistic language and English as a language that has been reappropriated for its local contexts. Given its historical and contemporary status as the world's most hegemonic language, we need to know how ideologies regarding English emerge and adapt through hybrid language practices, and how they relate to current theories of global English. Next, I discuss multivocality and how it relates to current perspectives on global English that have become prominent in academic circles.

Multivocality

Multivocality refers to a set of interlinked concepts detailed in Bakhtin's writings on voice as well as the multiple perspectives, or speaking positions, articulated through language. The term describes the quality of linguistic utterances as 'contested terrains' (Holquist, 2002: 24) in which multiple meanings of utterances can be voiced, and where an indefinite number of interpretations are possible. Bakhtin's insistence on the multiplicity of language was a response to what he called the 'monologization' of human experience in academic thought of his time. In particular, he challenged Saussure's scholarly work for its failure to address the plurality of everyday language, calling him an 'abstract objectivist' due to his concentration on shared aspects of langue (Holquist, 2002: 42). In contrast, Bakhtin promoted 'individualistic subjectivism' by emphasizing the disunity of speech, insisting on the difference and complexity of utterances. In his writings, he underscored the indeterminacy and unfinalizability of language, and he characterized social life and human existence as 'an open dialogue characterized by multivocality and the indeterminacy inherent when those multiple voices interpenetrate' (Baxter, 2004: 108).

In this book, I use the term multivocality in two interrelated ways that correspond roughly to an interlinked microlevel and macrolevel sociolinguistic analysis. Firstly, multivocality refers to the different 'voices' or polyphony that single utterances can yield due to their syncretic nature. Creative language forms are frequently produced when speakers intermingle the languages and language varieties circulating in their daily lives. The results of this multilingual practice are varied and can take the form of assimilation into a language (i.e. borrowing), language mixing (the use of two or more languages that produces no pragmatic effect), and codeswitching (the use of two or more languages that does carry a pragmatic effect, cf. Auer, 1999). Another possibility is that language mixing can result in a type of syncretism that retains the multivocal quality of the utterance and conveys all possible meanings simultaneously. Woolard (1998) describes these forms as bivalent, that is, belonging equally to two languages at once. Bivalent forms allow speakers to remain in the interstices of multivocality, rather than having to choose one code or another. As the chapters of this book show, bivalent multivocality allows for a range of double-voiced usages, including parody, word play and double entendres.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "English as a Local Language"
by .
Copyright © 2009 Christina Higgins.
Excerpted by permission of Multilingual Matters.
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Table of Contents

1. Multivoiced Multilingualism

2. From Pre-colonial Beginnings to Multivocality

3. Double Voices in the Workplace

4. Miss World or Miss Bantu? Competing Dialogues on Female Beauty

5. The Polyphony of East African Hip Hop

6. Selling fasta fasta in the East African Marketplace

7. New Wor(l)d Order

Editorial Reviews

Hitherto, this field of scholarship has been dominated by the research of English as an ‘international language’ or ‘global language’ or ‘world language’. But in this book, Christina Higgins jettisons that norm and brings a daring yet refreshing new voice to the debate by focusing on the appropriation of English as a local language and mapping the politics of its co-existence with indigenous languages in Kenya and Tanzania. She has developed a framework that places multilingual practices at the theoretical centre while responding brilliantly to the growing relevance of social theory in sociolinguistics.

Professor Tope Omoniyi

The author clearly has an extensive knowledge of multilingual practices around the world. Her very detailed information about the sociolinguistics of mixed languages in Tanzania and Kenya is particularly impressive.

English World-Wide 32:1, 2011 - Alfred Buregeya

Hitherto, this field of scholarship has been dominated by the research of English as an 'international language' or 'global language' or 'world language'. But in this book, Christina Higgins jettisons that norm and brings a daring yet refreshing new voice to the debate by focusing on the appropriation of English as a local language and mapping the politics of its co-existence with indigenous languages in Kenya and Tanzania. She has developed a framework that places multilingual practices at the theoretical centre while responding brilliantly to the growing relevance of social theory in sociolinguistics.
Professor Tope Omoniyi, Roehampton University, UK

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