Marginality, subversive language and sex tourism

Multilingual practices at the Kenyan coast

Bibliographic Data

ID22037575
AuthorsNico Nassenstein (0000-0001-9530-2949, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, corresponding author)
Year2022
Volume9
Issue1
Publication date2022-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueMultilingual Margins A journal of multilingualism from the periphery (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2221-4216 • E-ISSN: 2663-4848
PublisherUniversity of the Western Cape Library Service (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.14426/mm.v9i1.1416
OpenAlexW4387919187
LanguageEN
References cited12

Kenyan beaches are multilingual spaces of encounters between European ‘package tourists’ and African beach vendors, but also play host to the social inequalities and marginalization of the ubiquitous sex tourism business. In contrast to well-researched youth language practices, often understood as playful linguistic trends, young beach boys’ patterns of foreign language acquisition and their multilingual performance at the beaches are based on economic survival and offer a different perspective on multilingual practice: Most of the male sex workers with broad linguistic repertoires undergo a painful process to learn the tourists’ languages, based on experiences of degradation, hostility and shame. The fluid translanguaging practices of marginalized speakers draw from Kiswahili and local Mijikenda languages while also incorporating a vast lexicon from tourist languages. At the same time, they serve a subversive function, evident in the modification of vulgar German lexemes, which allows marginalized sex workers to mimetically “speak back” to their female customers. In my overview paper, I aim to discuss the role of tourists’ languages in emerging translanguaging processes and I intend to investigate the “darker side” of heteroglossic repertoires in the tourism sector; where I claim that multilingual experience is often linked to and reflects marginality, exploitation, and social inequality

German · Linguistics · Multilingualism · Pedagogy · Political science · Shame · Sociology · Tourism · Translanguaging · Diaspora, migration, transnational identity · Gender Studies · Multilingual Education and Policy · Psychology · Sex work and related issues · Social Psychology

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