Higgins English as a Local Language

Post-colonial Identities and Multilingual Practices
Erscheinungsjahr 2009
ISBN: 978-1-84769-693-9
Verlag: Multilingual Matters
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, Band 2, 176 Seiten

Reihe: Critical Language and Literacy Studies

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.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Higgins, Christina

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Sprachwissenschaft Mehrsprachigkeit
• Sozialwissenschaften Ethnologie | Volkskunde Ethnologie Kultur- und Sozialethnologie: Allgemeines
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Postkoloniale Geschichte, Nationale Befreiung und Unabhängigkeit
• Geisteswissenschaften Sprachwissenschaft Soziolinguistik

Inhaltsverzeichnis

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

Über Autor(innen)

Higgins, Christina
Dr Christina Higgins is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Second Language Studies at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where she teaches courses in sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, and intercultural communication. Her recent research has focused on communication in NGO-sponsored HIV/AIDS prevention and awareness education in Tanzania, where she has investigated the discursive construction of local and global worldviews. In her book, English as a local language: Post-colonial identities and multilingual practices (Multilingual Matters), she has also explored the role of language and popular culture in HIV/AIDS awareness efforts in hip hop lyrics and in public health advertisements. Her website can be found at http://www2.hawaii.edu/~cmhiggin.

Christina Higgins is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Second Language Studies, University of Hawai‘i at Manoa, 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.