Language Conflict: Transactions and Games in Kenya

Abstract

Language shift amid vast socioeconomic change and the tenacity with which groups hold on to their language despite and political change are contradictory trends that intrigue but often frustrate language planners and scholars seeking to explain patterns of language use (Rubin 1979). In order to analyze these patterns, many scholars conceive of language as a social resource (Eastman 1983a) that is exploited by individuals and groups to affect personal and political outcomes. This perspective has both a and a component. Socioand anthropological linguists who take the micro perspective focus their attention on individual speakers who vary their linguistic repertoires to establish or adjust their identity and/or to enhance their power. Microanalysis usually involves the systematic observation of linguistic transactions in complex urban environments. From these transactions, we see a world in which languages are evolving, where the boundaries between languages are fluid and weak, and in which each person has his/her own repertoire of languages and dialects. Political linguistics has developed a more macro perspective (see Beer and Jacob (1985) for recent papers). Its focus is on groups and nation-states. In this world, individuals are members of more-or-less stable language communities, and are citizens/subjects of a state that perhaps seeks the homogenization of language repertoires and/or the peaceful reconciliation of language groups. While microanalysis has prospered in its use of transaction analysis, macroanalysis remains in search of a research technique. In this article, game theory will be proposed as the complement to transaction analysis. These traditions, while not antithetical, have not been reconciled. It is the purpose of this article to demonstrate both the power yet incompleteness of each perspective based on a discussion of the language situation in Kenya. A reconciliation of the two foci, it should become clear, is a necessary condition for a fully developed theory of language conflict and language change. This article takes the modest step of elaborating the differences by analyzing patterns of language shift from both perspectives. Although it focuses on the Kenyan situation, the theoret-