English in the multilingual ecologies of Tanzania

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Roland Kießling
• Subject Area: Individual Linguistics, Historical Linguistics ; General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 528506225

This project explores the language ecologies of Tanzania and the role that English plays in them. Within the larger scope of the Research Unit, it contributes a case study that stands out by a postcolonial setting in which English competes with an officially established African language, Swahili, in the top layer of a highly diversified multilingual macro-ecology comprising representatives of all four traditionally recognized African phylae. In its relation to Swahili, English occupies an ambivalent position: While enjoying absolute prestige as hallmark of high education and economic success, its supremacy is overridden by the relative prestige of Swahili for all practical needs. Despite its co-official status, English has not made it beyond the level of an international second language in Tanzania, in contrast to other African countries such as Nigeria and Ghana. The neoliberal turn since the 1990s, however, along with the impact of globalization and the spread of new media of communication, has relaxed the normative rigidity of the Swahili regime inherited from the socialist era (Ujamaa). Language policy has opened, to limited degrees, domains for local languages other than Swahili and allows English in domains that had been restricted to Swahili before. Previously outlawed practices of code-switching and code-mixing between Swahili and English penetrate to contexts such as parliamentary debates and university classrooms, augmenting linguistic hybridity and undermining what seems to be a received ideology that views languages as hermetically closed systems. While these tendencies point to an accelerated pace of local appropriation of English, access to English remains highly imbalanced, constrained by a variety of parameters such as age, social class, education, gender, ethnolinguistic background and the urban-rural divide. Focussing on three different Tanzanian settings, the project aims to produce sociolinguistic data sets that will be used for cross-regional comparison within the Research Unit, applying the concepts of multilingual ecologies, language repertoires, and Dominant Language Constellations. Particular focus will be on less educated portions of society both in urban and rural settings. Research will be guided by the following questions: Which type of language repertoires can be found in rural vs. urban ecologies that are characterized by different constellations of autochthonous languages at the grassroots? Which patterns of Dominant Language Constellations do the repertoires reflect? Ultimately, how do ethnolinguistic constellations and their hierarchies at the grassroots level affect, constrain, boost or block the acquisition, diffusion, expansion and adaption of English in a complex postcolonial macro-ecology that is characterised, in contrast to many other African countries, by the successful implementation of an autochthonous African language, Swahili, competing with the ex-colonial language English for official status?

• DFG Programme: Research Units
• Subproject of: FOR 5728: Convergence on Dominant Language Constellations: World Englishes in their local multilingual ecologies (CODILAC)
• International Connection: Tanzania
• Cooperation Partner: Professor Dr. Amani Lusekelo