English as a Local Language

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.

• 1. Multivoiced Multilingualism2. From Pre-colonial Beginnings to Multivocality3. Double Voices in the Workplace4. Miss World or Miss Bantu? Competing Dialogues on Female Beauty5. The Polyphony of East African Hip Hop6. Selling fasta fasta in the East African Marketplace7. New Wor(l)d Order

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.