Crossroads of Language, Interaction and Culture

This paper discusses how successful Tanzanian beauty contestants mark themselves as educated sophisticates through clusters of semiotic materials. At lower-level and provincial competitions, contestants’ ability to speak ‘pure,’ if non-fluent and non-standard, English helps them achieve victory. This register is coupled with local, often outlandish, interpretations of international fashions and hairstyles. Yet in the capital city, and especially at the national competition, winning contestants speak a standard, fluent variety of English, a super-elite register that is typically only acquired through tertiary education or through membership in an elite urban household. They also adorn themselves in ways that are in keeping with global trends. When provincial contestants advance through the pageant hierarchy, they find their language skills and agrestic style become indexical a lack of knowledge and sophistication. This paper thus explores the variable and hierarchical formulations of ‘language competence’ (Blommaert et al 2005), and emphasizes, using Agha’s (2007) notion of ‘metasemiotic scheme,’ that such competence is neither acquired, nor interpreted, in isolation from other symbolic behaviors.