Christina Higgins
  • ABOUT
  • RESEARCH
    • Identity and family languages
    • Health Communication
    • Local-global identities
    • Geosemiotics
  • Publications
  • Additional Scholarly Work
  • Teaching
  • LINKS

Local-global identities

I have long been fascinated by the use of multiple languages in the linguistic repertoires of multilingual people. My dissertation examined English-Swahili codeswitching in the workplace, with the expectation that English might be used as a resource for identifying with 'out group' reference points.  While this did happen, I also found that the workers adapted and blended English into their interactions for varied purposes, including mitigating face-threatening actions, creating humor, and establishing a sense of equality among colleagues - and hence, used English as a local language.  Since my dissertation days, I have continued to research how multilinguals in Tanzania and Hawai`i use their linguistic repertoires to express social identities and to manage social relations in a range of contexts, with attention to how local and global references and affiliations are brought in to play and also transgressed. This research now includes studies of face-to-face interaction at work, social media discourse, cinematic discourse, hip hop, beauty pageants, and advertising. 


  • Higgins, C., Furukawa, G., & Lee, H. (in review). Teaching less commonly recognized languages on Youtube: The metapragmatics of Konglish and Pidgin. In S. Leppänen, S. Kytölä, H. Jousmäki, S. Peuronen and E.Westinen (Eds.) Discourse and identification:  Diversity and heterogeneity in social media practices. (volume under contract). Routledge.
  • Higgins, C. (2015). Intersecting scapes, global linguistic flows, and new millennium hybridities. Language Teaching: Surveys and Reports 48(3), 343-372.  
  • Higgins, C. (2015). Insult or act of identity? Stylization in multilingual discourse. Multilingua 34 (2) 135-158.
  • Higgins, C. (2013). When local and global scapes collide: Reterritorializing English in East Africa. In R. Rubdy & L. Alsagoff (eds.) Language choice and linguistic & cultural hybridity at the global-local interface (pp. 17-40). Bristol: Multilingual Matters.​
  • Higgins, C. & Furukawa, G. (2012). Styling Hawai‘i in haolewood: White protagonists on a voyage of self discovery. Multilingua 31,177-198.
  • Higgins, C. (2011). Epilogue: Hybridizing scapes and the production of new identities. In C. Higgins (ed.) Identity formation in globalizing contexts: Language learning in the new millennium (pp. 279-284). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
  • Higgins, C. (2009). English as a local language. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. 
  • Higgins, C. (2007). Constructing membership in the in-group: Affiliation and resistance among urban Tanzanians.  Pragmatics 17, 49-70.
  • Higgins, C. (2007). Shifting tactics of intersubjectivity to align indexicalities: A case of joking around in Swahinglish. Language in Society 36, 1-24.
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  • ABOUT
  • RESEARCH
    • Identity and family languages
    • Health Communication
    • Local-global identities
    • Geosemiotics
  • Publications
  • Additional Scholarly Work
  • Teaching
  • LINKS