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

Preface

As English continues to spin ever outwards from its assumed former centers, used in more and more contexts and in more and more diverse ways, there is a growing sense that we need new ways to investigate these new conditions of language. We have operated for so long with the standard tropes of (socio) linguistics in the hope that the idea of a language spreading and diversifying into regional varieties will continue to account for this linguistic expansion. The Kachruvian concentric circles of World Englishes have long held sway, with English moving out like ripples across a pond before taking on various national identities (Indian, Singaporean, Nigerian, Philippine Englishes). Conventional concepts such as diglossia and codeswitching have long been employed to explain the relations between languages and the ways in which multilingual speakers make use of them. Notions of bi- and multilingualism continue to be used as ways of accounting for multiple language use. More recently, the focus has shifted to look at English as a lingua franca, engendering new debates about the extent to which this presents a static or dynamic account of English as it is used across different regions.

Increasingly, however, scholars interested in the global spread of English have started to wonder whether these old categorizations of language use really work any more (Bruthiaux, 2003). Developed in contexts very different to those in which English now finds itself, many of these concepts simply do not seem to address the forms of hybrid urban multilingualism in which English now participates. Indeed, there are strong reasons to question the very notion of English, or any language, as discrete entities that are describable in terms of core and variation (Makoni & Pennycook, 2007). On the one hand, language studies need to confront the changing realities of urban life, with enhanced mobility, shifting populations, social upheaval, health and climate crises, increased access to diverse media, particularly forms of popular culture, and new technologies. On the other hand, language studies are confronted by the growing concern that we need to rethink the ways in which language has been conceptualized.

While a great deal of concern has been expressed about language death, about the move from one language to another by different groups of people, there has been less focus on the shifting identifications and new language creations in contexts such as urban Africa. Bosire (2006: 192) describes the ‘hybrid languages of Africa’ as ‘contact outcomes that have evolved at a time when African communities are coming to terms with the colonial and post-colonial situation that included rapid urbanization and a bringing together of different ethnic communities and cultures with a concomitant exposure to different ways of being. The youth are caught up in this transition; they are children of two worlds and want a way to express this duality, this new ethnicity’. Out of this mix, emerge new language varieties, such as ‘Sheng’, a Swahili/English hybrid, that provides urban youth with ‘a way to break away from the old fraternities that put particular ethnic communities in particular neighborhoods/estates and give them a global urban ethnicity, the urbanite: sophisticated, street smart, new generation, tough’ (Bosire, 2006: 192). This focus on emergent languages of the street brings to the fore the ways in which new varieties of language are forged as acts of identity.

Higgins’ work takes up these challenges, destabilizing dominant conceptualizations of English as a distinct code, as a global language, as an entity bounded by particular domains of use. Instead, she suggests we need to grasp the implications of the hybridity and linguistic bricolage in which English so often participates. In a variety of ethnographic studies of multilingual practices in East Africa (mainly Tanzania), including work places, market places, popular culture (hip hop) and beauty pageants, this book draws attention to the multivocality of hybrid forms of multilingualism involving English. For Higgins, the Bakhtinian concept of multivocality offers a more useful way of understanding English use in these diverse contexts. Multivocality refers both to the different ‘voices’ present in a single utterance as well as the bivalent syncretism of language mixing, where multiple meanings are conveyed simultaneously. Multivocality establishes multiplicity as a starting point for the analysis of language, treating contexts of multilingualism as open-ended and creative spaces of language intersection.

For Higgins, therefore, English needs to be understood as part of multilingual practice. It is also a local language. A basic premise of much of the work on world Englishes is that English has its origins in the central, native-speaker countries (UK, USA, Canada, Australia) and then is localized as it spreads. The comparison is always based on domains where local varieties differ from the original. Higgins, however, relocates English in these local contexts of multilingual language use. The focus, therefore, is no longer on a variety of English answerable to the center but rather on the ways in which monologic uses of English occur in domains such as education (or, indeed, beauty pageants) while other domains such as popular culture (hip hop) and advertising use more multivocal forms of language. This focus on the multivocal sociolinguistics of hip hop is part of a new direction in research, bringing together cultural studies and sociolinguistics to show the dynamism of new, popular uses of language (see Alim et al., 2009). As Higgins points out, these domains also draw on each other, so that politicians and AIDS educators will also draw on the multivocality of hip hop to get their message across.

A key strength of Higgins’ work is the close ethnographic attention she brings to the different contexts discussed in this book. One important aspect of this is that she refuses to rely on text analysis alone without the interpretations of those who read the texts; nor does she claim that her analysis alone is the only interpretation. A problem that emerges in applied linguistic research from a critical perspective is that it often attempts to use ethnography and critical discourse analysis (CDA) together. While not incompatible, the difficulty here is that CDA tends to rely almost entirely on the processes and perspectives of the analyst. There may be a nod in the direction of text production and interpretation but by and large it is critical armchair discourse analysis (CADA) that holds sway (see Blommaert, 2005). In order to understand how hybridized English is interpreted, Higgins attempts to overcome this problem of researcher-centered interpretation by including the perspectives of the language users themselves. This is something that always needs to be kept in mind in research that attempts to give a critical account of language use: whose critical version is this?

Christina Higgins shows in this book how East Africans exploit the heteroglossia of language to perform modern identities. This focus on the performative nature of language helps us see how language and identity are produced by localizing global linguistic and cultural resources. Her work adds important insights to some of the newly emergent work on lingua franca English (LFE), when this is understood not as a ‘system out there’ but rather as ‘constantly brought into being in each context of communication’ (Canagarajah, 2007: 91). From this point of view, practice rather than prior language form is central: LFE is not so much an entity located in the minds of speakers as it is a social practice that is constantly being reconstructed in a specific locality. Higgins’ work thus responds to Nakata's (2007: 39) critique of ‘the inability of linguists to give primacy to language speakers’, and takes up Canagarajah's (2007: 98) call for a ‘linguistics that treats human agency, contextuality, diversity, indeterminacy, and multimodality as the norm’. She has confronted this dual challenge to address the locality of English in contexts such as East Africa and to rethink the ways in which language is constructed in such contexts. In a significant addition to our Critical Language and Literacy Studies series, Higgins has opened up a new space here for thinking about language, locality and multivocality.

Alastair Pennycook

Bonny Norton

Vaidehi Ramanathan

References

Alim, S., Ibrahim, A. and Pennycook, A. (eds) (2009) Global Linguistic Flows: Hip Hop Cultures, Youth Identities, and the Politics of Language. New York: Routledge.

Blommaert, J. (2005) Discourse: A Critical Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bosire, M. (2006) Hybrid languages: The case of Sheng. In O.F. Arasanyin and M.A. Pemberton (eds) Selected Proceedings of the 36th Annual Conference on African Linguistics (pp. 185–193). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project.

Bruthiaux, P. (2003) Squaring the circles: Issues in modeling English worldwide. International Journal of Applied Linguistics 13 (2), 159–177.

Canagarajah, S. (2007) The ecology of global English. International Multilingual Research Journal 1 (2) 89–100.

Makoni, S. and Pennycook, A. (2007) Disinventing and reconstituting languages. In S. Makoni and A. Pennycook (eds) Disinventing and Reconstituting Languages (pp. 1–41). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.

Nakata, M. (2007) Disciplining the Savages: Savaging the Disciplines. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press.

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, Nairobi¹

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 Africa² 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 codeswitching, localized Englishes and urban vernaculars have been widely analyzed,³ 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