Languages of National Politics in Kenya and Tanzania

• In Event: African Politics & Public Administration Virtual Poster Session
  In Virtual Poster Session: African Politics Virtual Poster Session

Abstract

How do politicians’ uses of different languages affect voter attitudes and political outcomes in multilingual societies? Neighboring Kenya and Tanzania are both highly ethnolinguistically diverse countries with more than 40 and 120 officially acknowledged ethnolinguistic groups, respectively. Tanzania has strongly promoted Kiswahili since the days of its ujamaa socialist nation-building project while Kenya has more gradually increased official recognition of Kiswahili alongside the continued dominance of English in many prestigious official domains and some state recognition for other, non-Kiswahili indigenous languages. The existing language policies contribute to how citizens interact with elected officials and politicians, both by directly regulating political language use and by affecting the varying knowledge of and attitudes toward English, the national language of Kiswahili, and other locally predominant first languages within society. This paper presents the results of a new phone survey experiment examining whether and, if so, how multilingual Kenyan and Tanzanian participants’ perceptions of a speaker vary, on average, depending on the language of the short, spoken political message heard, including whether there any observed differences between the Kenyan and Tanzanian respondents. This study provides more detailed information about how citizens perceive the political use of various languages, including those more associated with the nation and those associated with specific ethnicities, and how those perceptions vary across two national political environments shaped by differing language policies.

Author

• Andrew Marshall, Georgetown University