social nature of language
392
 "Repertoires are made up of ways of
speaking in the sense of Hymes (1974a): forms of language use (not of language
substance) and knowledge of their use in social environments, of the implicit
norms for context-specific genred discourse production and reception.5 Ways
of speaking pertain to complexes of modes of language use (spoken vs written,
visual or multimedial, productive vs receptive activities, singing, shouting,
whispering, etc.), genres (formal speech, routine conversation, recitation,
storytelling, joke-telling, gossiping, letter-writing, note-making, paper-writing,
etc.), styles or keys in which to perform (distance vs deference, high- vs lowperformance,
long, short interventions, etc.). And each time they are associated
withparticular formalaspects of language: the choice of particular codes (dialect
393
 vs standard, handwritten vs machine-written, ‘French’ vs ‘Lingala’, etc.) and of
particular formal structures in language (syntax, sounds, lexis . . .).The outcome
of this iswhat I calla shape of language: a conglomerate of form and load."



"This brings us to the social load of the resources. Every difference in language
is socially valued and marked as to degree of fit in particular contexts.
Language use, therefore, is fundamentally indexical in nature, and every act
of language use produces numerous indexical signals that connect the particular
shape of language not only to the local ‘context’ (in the sense of contextualization:
Gumperz 1982; see also Auer and Di Luzio 1992), but to larger
orders of indexicality that are valid in groups/systems. The issue of authority
comes in at this point, and it will be the topic of the next subsection. I want to
emphasize here that the ‘function’of language ^ what we usually call the production
of meaning ^ cannot be separated fromvalue attribution.‘Meaning’ is
a product of evaluation of language shapes along standards, norms and expectations
^ standards that are never purely local-contextual and hence never
completely open to negotiation."

"I subscribe here to a‘poetic’or ‘aesthetic’ perspective on language, central to
performance-oriented approaches to language such as those articulated in,
for example, Bauman and Briggs (1990) and focused on language as a form of
action/meaningful symbolic behaviour encompassing ‘language’ in the traditional
sense as well as more general (usually defined as ‘non-linguistic’)
aspects of semiosis. An unfortunate by-product of this line of thought is the
absence of the comfort of suggested clarity generated by terms such as ‘English’
or ‘Dutch’: the units we are using here have no name (Silverstein1977:145)."

"While performing language use, speakers
display orientations towards orders of indexicality ^ systemically reproduced
indexicalities often called ‘norms’ or ‘rules’ of language, and always typically
associated with particular shapes of language (e.g. the ‘standard’, the prestige
variety, the ‘usual’ way of having a conversation with my friends, etc.)
(Silverstein 1998).7 By doing so, they (systemically) reproduce these norms,
and situate them in relation to other norms. Thus, there is always identity work
involved, and the orientations towards orders of indexicality are the grassroots
displays of ‘groupness’. To give an example: young people communicate
through orientations to peer group norms; in that way they reproduce the
peer group and situate it vis-a' -vis other peer groups and society at large, thus
making the group recognizable both from the inside and from the outside"

394
"The systemically reproduced indexicalities are often tied to specific actors,
centering institutions (Silverstein1998: 404) that are often also‘central’ institutions
imposing the ‘doxa’ in a particular group. The centering function is
attributive: it generates indexicalities towhich others have to orient in order to
be ‘social’, that is to produce meanings that ‘belong’ somewhere. These attributions
are emblematic: they revolve around the potential to articulate ‘central
values’ of a group or system (the ‘good’ group member, the ‘ideal’ father/
mother/child,‘God’,‘the country/nation’, the ‘law’, the ‘good’ student, the ‘ideal’
intellectual, the ‘real man/woman’ . . .). And this centering almost always
involves either perceptions or real processes of homogenization: orienting
towards such a center involves the (real or perceived) reduction of difference
and the creation of recognizably ‘normative’meaning."

"Centering institutions occur at all levels of social life, ranging fromthe family
over small peer groups, more or less stable communities (e.g. university students,
factory workers, members of a church), the state and transnational communities,
all the way through to the world system.They are a central feature of
what Anderson (1983) called ‘imagined communities’: though imagined, they
trigger specific behaviours and generate groups. But it is worth underscoring
that the social environment of almost any individual would by definition be
polycentric, with a wide range of overlapping and criss-crossing centers to
which orientations need to be made, and evidently with multiple ‘belongings’
for individuals (often understood as ‘mixed’ or ‘hybrid’ identities; see also
Canagarajah this issue). To paraphrase Sapir (in Darnell 2001: 127): there are
more groups of significance thanmembers participating inthem." fascinating. Complicates this discussion

Groups are stratified

Inequality

" would say, is voice understood as the capacity to make oneself ‘heard’ (or
‘read’) in terms of what we have sketched above (cf. Voloshinov 1973; Hymes
1996).Voice is the capacity to engage in socially ‘placeable’communication, to
produce a degree of isomorphism between projected ‘meaning’ (i.e. functionvalue)
and granted ‘meaning’, or in other words, the capacity to produce the
right functions in communication dialogically, by means of creative practice
which develops within a set of constraints"

395

"When using
language, we map formonto function. Function, as said, is tied to social evaluation
of meaningfulness, and this relates to orders of indexicality emanating
fromcentering institutions. Function is thus clearly not an‘essence’, but a relational,
relative phenomenon which depends on the structure and scope of the
repertoires of speakers (Hymes 1966; Silverstein 1998). The process of mapping
presupposes and requires the existence of contextualizing (‘centering’)
spaces in which particular forms can be attributed meaning."

Problems
1. differential access to forms, to linguistic/communicative resources,
resulting in differential capacities to accomplish certain functions. Think
of absence of access to literacy or to particular types of literacy; absence of
access to particular language varieties, codes, jargons, styles, genres,
resulting in small or truncated repertoires;
2. differential access to contextual spaces, i.e. spaces of meaning-attribution
where specific forms conventionally receive specific functions, resulting
in differential capacity to map forms onto functions, in other words, in
differential capacity to interpret.


"Regulating access in both domains is, in general, one of the functions of any
centering institution, and notably of the state (see below). As for (1), people
differ in repertoires and, consequently, in what they can do with them. They
enter communicative events with different means that structure, define and
determine what they can do and accomplish in that event. Not everyone will
be the ‘ideal speaker’ of Chomskyan linguistics; in effect, probably no-one is.
People have different pretextualities, different ‘baggage’ they carry around, that
will enable them to communicate in certain ways and not in others (Maryns
and Blommaert 2002; Maryns 2004)."

" As for (2), such differences may not only result in relatively harmless ‘misunderstandings’;
they are genuine power differences. Not everyone has the capacity
to provide any interpretation to any stretch of communication, and this
matters: spaces of interpretation are, just like all other aspects of the communicative
complex, stratified and unevenly distributed, and some of these spaces
are sites of tremendous power: the legal, medical or other expert spaces are
cases in point. And the fact is that only some people have access to such spaces
and can grant certain interpretations to words. Only a judge can transform
narrative bits of real-life experience into evidence of a punishable crime."

issues of decontextualized recontextualized
"texts, discourses,
images, get shipped around in a process inwhich they are repeatedly decontextualized
and recontextualized ^ entextualized in the words of Bauman and
Briggs (1990) and Silverstein and Urban (1996) (Blommaert 2001b). In such
processes, all kinds of mappings are performed, often deeply different from"

396

" Consequently, categories
or other features that did not occur as salient in the initial act were added to it
in later phases ^ for instance, talk can be ‘gendered’, ‘raced’, ‘classed’ afterwards,
by someone who was not involved in the initial act of communication
(not only a fact of bureaucratic or other institutional practice, but also a
common feature of our own professional practices). Depending on the way in
which access to contextual spaces is structured, lots of acts of communication
are ‘replaced’ and given other functions ^ a process in which the initial
functions often get removed (Mehan1996; Briggs1997; Blommaert 2001c)."

"Inequality will occur whenever pretextual gaps
occur: differences between capacity to produce function and expected or normative
function. Whenever the resources people possess do not match the
functions they are supposed to accomplish, they risk being attributed other
functions than the ones projected, intended or necessary. Sometimes, this can
amount to a simple and repairable misunderstanding, at other times, however,
it can be highly consequential"

The state?

1.  The state is a switchboard between various levels. In particular, it is the
actor that organizes a dynamic between the world systemand‘locality’.The
state often orients towards transnational centering institutions: capitalism,
democracy, an international work order, transnational images of prestige
and success, models of education, and so forth. It often also orients to
transnational models of language and language use: literacy, the relative
value of ‘local’ languages versus ‘world’ languages and so forth. This
dynamic is two-way, contrasting between‘us’and‘the rest of the world’, and
it is at the core of many state activities.

2.Thus, the state is one of the main organizers of possible contrasts
within a particular space: it allows others to create differences between
their norms and those that are valid nationally (e.g. those that are
transmitted through the education system). Civil society, for instance, will

397
 typically organize itself in contrast to (or modelled on) the state.The state is,
wherever it exists, a centering institution with a considerable scope and
depth. And the state is very often the actor that uses ‘language’ in the sense
of ‘language name’ (English/French/Chinese etc.) as its ‘central value’.

3.  The state can contribute a materiality to its role as a centering institution
in a way hard to match by others. The state has the capacity to provide an
infrastructure for the reproduction of a particular regime of language: an
education system, media, culture production ^ each time a selective
mechanism which includes some forms of language and excludes others.
The state, in other words, has the capacity to exert substantial control
over the two dynamics of access discussed in the previous section: access
to forms and access to spaces of interpretation. The state has coercive
instruments usually exclusive to the state: the legal system and the law
enforcement system. So the state is often a determining force in the
sociolinguistic landscape, in contrast to other centering institutions
whose effect can best be described as dominant.

reference to the state - activity!!

Tanzania
398
The outcome will be a paradox: the
state’s attempt towards the generalization of Swahili at (almost) all levels of
society was a huge success; its attempt towards ideological hegemony, however,
was a failure. The two subsections to follow will offer explanations for
this, first, by discussing the position of the state vis-a'-vis developments both at
higher and at lower levels, and second, by looking at some grassroots language
practices that may reveal some of the dynamics that caused the paradox.

"In LRP, the argument of linguistic rights: (a) almost invariably
involves the promotion of indigenous languages as status languages at all
levels of society; and (b) usually identifies the state as a crucial actor in this
process, both negatively (the state denies rights to people) and positively (the
state is the actor that should provide and secure rights for people). Tanzania is
a case in point."

 fascinating...

 "few qualifications are in order here. First, the ideal situation envisaged by
the architects of the campaignwas monoglot (Silverstein1996): the campaign
would be a success when the population would use one language imbued with
one set of ideological loads: those of Ujamaa. Homogeneity was the target, and
the spread of Swahili-and-Ujamaawould have to go hand in hand with the disappearance
of other languages-and-ideologies. The first target, obviously, was
English ^ the language of imperialism, capitalism and oppression; but the
same went for the local languages, which were seen as vehicles for traditional,
pre-colonial cultures, as well as for ‘non-standard’ varieties of Swahili (e.g.
code-switching, urban varieties), that were sensed to indicate the"

399
 ..."incompleteness of the process of hegemony. The ‘better’ and ‘purer’ one’s
Swahili would be, the better socialist Tanzanian patriot one would be."

" Second, not only the conception of language as a vehicle for a specified
(politically defined) set of Herderian ideological values, but the whole operational
conception of language was inherited from colonial predecessor regimes."


"Tanzania, scholars kept referring to English as at the kind of level of ‘development
and modernization’ that needed to be attained for Swahili. And pending
that ‘full languageness’of Swahili, Englishwould have to be used in higher education
in order to produce a class of top-notch intellectuals needed for specialized
service to the country. Thus, while Swahili was spread to all corners of the
country, and was used in almost every aspect of everyday life, post-primary
education remained (and still is) a domain where Englishwas hegemonic."


 "Decades of concentrated efforts towards the goal set forth in the early1960s
resulted in the generalized spread of Swahili. Sociolinguistically, Swahili and
its varieties have become the identifying code of public activities throughout
Tanzania. But what did not happen was the ideological homogenization of the
country ^ while Swahilization was manifestly a success, the monoglot ideal
was a failure. Neither English nor local languages and ‘impure’ varieties of
Swahili disappeared. And the spread of Swahili did not galvanize the hegemony
of Ujamaa: the one-party system collapsed in the late 1980s and it was
replaced by a multiparty, liberal capitalist state organization which, ironically,
adopted Swahili as its vehicle for nationwide communication (just as the postcolonial
state had adopted Swahili as an interesting instrument for propaganda
and grassroots organization fromthe British colonialists before them)."

400 -constructions of Tanzania as state

6. "The bottom line to all of this is: the state was an intermediate institution
responding both to calls from above and from below, and the state to some
extent became stuck between these two levels. The state was not an
autonomous actor, but an embedded one, one that invited very different
approaches dependent on the level from which one approached it. Add to
this the heritage of models of language and language infrastructures ^
the monoglot, purist, standard, Herderian complex ^ handed down as
part of the way in which Tanzania had to fit into the world order (and
developed for Swahili by colonial linguistics), and we end up with a
strangely contradictory general image."


"But at the same time, it was extremely
weak, because the instruments with which it could work were deficient in
both scope and capacity (Tanzania was, and is, a very poor country) and
hand-me-downs from transnational levels that could never answer the
ambitions of the state itself nor those of local groups in civil society. To put
it in its crudest (and hence overstated) form: the state had adopted
sociolinguistic models and ideals that were recipes for inequality
wherever they were applied, while these models were at the same time
always offered as recipes for progress, modernization and development."

what did people do with language?

403

(Rampton)
demonstrates how London adolescents of a variety of ethnolinguistic backgrounds
create ways of speaking that orient to new, peer-group or popular
youth culture indexicalities, and thus allow ‘crossing’ into ethnolinguistic
indexical spaces not customarily theirs (e.g. white Anglo kids adopting
Jamaican creole). In practice, ‘customarily’ here stands for indexicalities that
are valid at higher levels and are produced by other centering institutions such
as education, neighbourhood norms, or national norms of ‘standard’and ‘substandard’or
prestige and stigma. Thus, what counts as a prestigious language
variety fromthe point of viewof the school systemcan be a stigmatized variety
from the point of view of the pupils, and vice versa (e.g. Rasta slang can be a
prestige code)."


"This, I would argue, is the level at which we have to look if we want to understand
what people actually do with language, what language does to them,
and what language means to them, in what particular ways it matters to them."

404
"There
is an orientation to English as a code associated with core values of capitalist
ideas of success: entrepreneurship, mobility, luxury, female beauty. The use of
English is sensed to index all of this. But at the same time, it indexes this not
in terms of internationally valid norms (e.g. standard varieties of written
English), but in term of local diacritics. The man who commissioned the disabled
kiosk sign probably did not imagine himself as an international businessman,
but he did imagine himself as a businessman in Dar es Salaam (or even
more specifically, in the Magomeni neighbourhood of Dar es Salaam). And at
this point, a new space of meaning-attribution is opened.We have an act of
communication which at once orients towards transnational indexicalities
and to strictly local ones, and the effect is that the English used in these signs
has to make sense here, in Magomeni ^ but as English, that is as a code suggesting
a ‘move out’ of Magomeni and an insertion into transnational imaginary
networks.1"

405
 Group of young people

" Despite class differences, all of the members would define their outlook on
life in terms of deep frustration ^ an awareness of being in the margins of
the world expressed through mottos such as jua kali (‘burning sun’, ‘hard
heat’, a metonym for the general condition of poverty and misery in
Tanzania) or machungu sana (‘much bitterness’, i.e. frustration), and marked
references to places, displaying an awareness of situatedness in a world
system: majuu: theWest (literally ‘the things up there’), Jahanam: the third
world (literally ‘Hell’)or motoni: the thirdworld (literally ‘in the fire’).

407
"But more interesting is the normativity in which all of this is couched. Kihuni
had its own centering institutions, its own bodies of codified norms: the rap stars
and the tabloids that used Kihuni. The group spontaneously formalized its
sessions with me, turning them into a kind of formal instruction into the
language. I audio-recorded what went on, but they also insisted that I should
make notes of the words and phrases they offered me. And while I was making
notes, they would watch carefully how I noted the words and phrases, and they
would occasionally ^ rather vigorously ^ correct me whenever what I wrote
down did not correspond to what they thought it should be."


 408
orthography matters

full language


408/ 409
state as centering institution


"By using one way of speaking versus
another, they could ‘place’ themselves in relation to images culled from the various
levels, the combination of which was a strongly local semiotics of identity,
probably only fully understandable ^ fully ‘social’ ^ to people from that place."


"This surely is a feature of inequality: the capacity to‘move out’ by means of
specific semiotic resources is definitely one of the elements of what we understand
by ‘empowering’, while resources with a ‘placing’ effect ^ keeping
speakers ‘in place’ ^ would be a feature of disempowerment. If the use of a
particular form of English fails to turn you into an international businessman,
but rather makes you more than ever the small-time shopkeeper from
Magomeni, then the mapping of form over function needs to be looked into
carefully."


"What is disempowering in the case of Tanzania is the whole
historical process of being caught in a marginal position in the world system.
This whole process governs the value of the linguistic resources: it governs
what people can do with them and what they do to people. In the case of
Tanzania, inequality resides in the fact that the functions of linguistic
resources controlled by speakers are primarily local, and this goes for local
languages, Swahili and English alike. As soon as they are moved out of the
local environment and circulated translocally, they lose function at a rapid
pace.The strong-weak state has left its mark."


"In the Tanzanian case, I cannot
be led to believe that English is only an agent of oppression or minorization.
The varieties of English spread across society enter a local social-semiotic
economy, and so offer opportunities for localizing transnational indexicalities
to speakers, the effects of which are highly meaningful locally. The problem is:
theyare onlymeaningful locally, they do not count as ‘English’as soon as translocal
norms are imposed on them.The kinds of English we have seen in our discussion
above are what we could call ‘low-mobility’ forms of English: they
only count as English in that particular environment. So the story of the ‘killer
language’ English becomes considerably more complicated (and interesting,
I would suggest). There are very different Englishes at play, at very different
scale-levels, and with very different effects and functions.
Neither can I be led to believe that the indigenous language Swahili has only
been the key to progress and liberation for the Tanzanians. Again, it isn’t that
simple. Swahili was, during its heyday, as effective an ‘imperial’ language as
English, Russian or Mandarin Chinese. It was imposed as a monoglot standard
with its own prestige varieties, and it was promoted together with strong
encouragements to stop using other languages (Blommaert 2001a).