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In:World Englishes in their Local Multilingual Ecologies
Edited by Peter Siemund, Gardy Stein and Manuela Vida-Mannl
[Hamburg Studies on Linguistic Diversity 9] 2025
► pp. 208–230

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Chapter 10
English in the linguistic landscape(s) of rural Tanzania

 | University of Dar es Salaam
 | University of Hamburg
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

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Published online: 24 April 2025
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https://doi.org/10.1075/hsld.9.10lus
Abstract
The linguistic macroecology of Tanzania is characterized by multiple interactions of languages that can generally be summarized as 2 + 1 out of many, involving the national official language Swahili, the ex-colonial and elitist (co-official) language English, and a panoply of 120+ vernacular languages, broadly forming a triglossia. While Tanzania’s Swahilisation policy during the Ujamaa socialist era (1967–1985) aimed at restricting public domains of English usage, the turn towards economic, cultural, and educational liberalization since the 1990s and the impact of internationalization, globalization, and the spread of new media of communication have come to boost the image of English considerably (Blommaert 2014; Legère 2006; Lema 2021). Its growing prestige is not only reflected in attitudes (Mohr 2018; Mohr, Lorenz & Ochieng 2020), but also in a surge of English-sourced items surfacing at various levels, e.g., in the urban juvenile stylects of Swahili known as Lugha ya Mitaani (Reuster-Jahn & Kießling 2022), in various terminological registers of standard Swahili (Lupapula 2021; Legère 2006), and in Tanzania’s linguistic landscapes at large. The present contribution provides a case study of the visual public presence of English at the Tanzanian grassroots level, e.g., in official signboards and private shop signs found in two remote areas of the Tanzanian Rift valley, i.e., Mkalama district (Singida region) and Mbulu district (Manyara region). By tracing the forms in which English penetrates into the remote corners of the Tanzanian rural linguistic landscapes, the contribution complements existing studies on the linguistics of Tanzanian cityscapes (Bwenge 2009; Chul-joon 2014; Peterson 2014; Mdukula 2018; Lusekelo & Alphonce 2018; Lusekelo & Mdukula 2021). At the same time, the chapter illustrates how English forms are appropriated, manipulated, and creatively adapted to local needs and aspirations in the process of translocation as exponents of global culture.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Tanzanian English?
  • 3.English in East African linguistic landscapes
    • 3.1Urban Tanzania
    • 3.2Rural Tanzania
  • 4.English in Tanzanian language ecologies
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
References (61)
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