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...