English Language Learning Trajectories among Zanzibaris Working in Tourism

Abstract

Increasing global mobility has also affected the global language ecology and tourism is a central phenomenon in this regard, both socially and linguistically. Tourist contexts, where English as global lingua franca is often used at the grassroots level, provide an important opportunity to investigate English away from the traditionally studied academic circles of World Englishes research. This chapter analyses one such context, that is English as used and acquired in the tourist industry of Unguja island of Zanzibar. Focusing on language learning trajectories in super-diversity, the study discusses the problem of an easy attribution of individual language learning paths to particular social groups and reveals the fuzziness of the grassroots concept and its boundaries.