Language essentialism and social hierarchies among Giriama and Swahili

Scholars have widely recognized essentialist discourse as a potentially pernicious means of conceptualizing categories of ‘race’ and ethnicity. What has not been so rigorously explored is the way in which socially differentiated languages may themselves be essentialized to similar ends. Indeed, the few scholars who have discussed essentialism and language have tended to allude to rather different patterns. This plurality of approaches indicates that essentialist modes of representation can inform cultural ideas of language in a variety of complex ways. In this paper, I consider six different ways in which cultural actors may apply essentialism to languages, and I explore how these varieties of language essentialism obtain among high status Swahili and subaltern Giriama in the township of Malindi on the coast of Kenya. I argue that such essentialisms are vital to local ethnic politics, including Swahili efforts to shore up an “authentic” ethnic identity, while screening out interlopers, and Giriama efforts to partake of the power and prestige of other ethnic groups. My broader contention is that fine-grained attention to language essentialisms can help elucidate the relationship between language ideology and social hierarchies in other contexts.