culture

The Social Circulation of Media Discourse and the Mediation of Communities Author(s): Debra Spitulnik Source: Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Vol. 6, No. 2 (DECEMBER 1996), pp. 161-187 Published by: Wiley on behalf of American Anthropological Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/43103171 Accessed: 02-02-2018 19:33 UTC

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■ Debra Spitulnïk EMORY UNIVERSITY

The Social Circulation of Media

Discourse and the Mediation of Communities

This article demonstrates how mass media , because of their extensive accessi- bility and scope , can serve as both reservoirs and reference points for the circulation of words, phrases , and discourse styles in popular culture. Focus- ing on the social circulation of radio discourse in Zambia, I examine the semiotics of the decontextualization, recontextualization,and creative rework- ing of media discourse outside of contexts of direct media consumption. The analysis illustrates one productive avenue for probing the linguistic intertex- tuality of large-scale societies , as well as the more general heteroglossic nature of language. It suggests that people's active engagements with mass media, along with the social circulation of media discourse and its intertextual connections, are key components in the construction and integration of communities.

Nothing somewhat the mass begins mediation intangible, from zero, of like communities and those this is that especially extend that are across true large, when cities, shifting, it comes regions, and to the mass mediation of communities that are large, shifting, and somewhat intangible, like those that extend across cities, regions,

and nations. When we look at the communications that emanate from mass media, we see that, like most other forms of speaking, they are preceded and succeeded by numerous other dialogues and pieces of language that both implicate them and render them interpretable. Such is the social life of language - as an abundance of scholars have repeatedly argued - to be imbricated in innumerable webs of connection with other utterances (Bakh-

tin 1981, 1986; Foucault 1972), indexically linked to past and future speech

Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 6(2):161-18 7. Copyright © 1997, American Anthropological Association.

161

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162 Journal of Linguistic Anthropology

events (Bauman and Briggs 1990:64; Irvine 1996; Silverstein 1976), and vitally entangled with the ongoing practices of everyday life (Hanks 1996). In this article, I would like to explore how such cross-linkages of language

in use - what have come to be called relations of intertextuality (following Bakhtin; cf. Briggs and Bauman 1992) - factor into the mediation of com- munities. Undertaking this task requires a return the older and very com- plex question of what constitutes a speech community. It also leads us into the relatively new terrain of investigating the actual processes of intertex- tuality, for example, questions about the transportability of speech forms from one context to another and the conditions that enable their decontex-

tualization and recontextualization (Bauman and Briggs 1990; Briggs and Bauman 1992; Lucy 1993; Silverstein and Urban 1996).

The specific problem to be examined here concerns the social circulation of media discourse in Zambian popular culture. We will consider several cases in which phrases and discourse styles are extracted from radio broad- casting and then recycled and reanimated in everyday usage, outside of the contexts of radio listening. As Urban has argued, such social circulation of discourse is essential for the existence of every society or culture because it creates a kind of "public accessibility" that is vital for the production of shared meaning (Urban 1991:10, also 27, 191). Relations of intertextuality are elemental in this process, according to Urban (1991:20), because shared meanings result from the construing of interconnections across different instances of publicly accessible discourse. While Urban focuses on how social circulation leads to public accessibility, much of the material consid- ered here exhibits somewhat of a reverse direction - where the widespread availability of the communication form itself creates possibilities for social circulation.1

The discussion below demonstrates that, because of their extensive ac- cessibility and scope, mass media can serve as both reservoirs and reference points for the circulation of words, phrases, and discourse styles in popular culture.2 In addition, it explores how mass media - as ongoing, high-status, public communication forms - have the potential to magnify and even create the "socially charged life" of certain linguistic forms (Bakhtin 1981:293). Thus as confirmation of Gumperz's early insight that "mass media and the prestige of their speakers tend to carry idioms far from their sources" (1971:223), we will see how radio's impact on everyday language extends from the introduction of single lexical items and catchphrases to the shifting of semantic fields and the modeling of discourse styles. And finally, the analysis below makes some broader linguistic and cultural generalizations about both the kinds of media discourse that circulate and the kinds of conditions that enable this circulation.

The implications of the social circulation of media discourse for questions about speech communities are far-reaching and go beyond Gumperz's (1971) important points about their impact on language change. First, it provides evidence that particular kinds of social situations and social institutions have greater weight than others in establishing the sociolinguis- tic significance of certain linguistic forms (Bourdieu 1991; Gal 1989; Gum- perz 1971; Irvine 1987; Kroskrity 1992). For example, in some societies, the

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Social Circulation of Media Discourse 163

dominant site for producing normative standards for linguistic usage might be political oratory, while in other societies it might be television newscast- ing. This has relevance for thinking about the constitution of speech com- munities, because it suggests that there is a correlation between social scale and the type of communication modality that dominates the mediation of community. Along these lines, one question that definitely merits much more exploration is whether mass communication itself is a necessary precondition for the construction of community in large-scale societies (Anderson 1983; Habermas 1989). This seems inherently to be the case, since public accessibility means something quite different in large-scale societies than in small-scale societies.

Second, it leads to a series of questions concerning the definition of the speech community and its applicability to large-scale societies. For exam- ple, does it even make sense to speak of a speech community across the nation-state when there is no one common language? When we are talking about millions of people who may never know or interact with one another, how do we handle questions about density of communication, frequency of interaction, and shared linguistic knowledge - three key features that figure prominently in various definitions of the speech community and that seem to be a prerequisite for the kind of discursive mediation of society described by Urban? While these three criteria have been challenged (or just abandoned) in recent work, along with the general utility of the speech community concept itself, I believe that they are relevant in important and interesting ways for thinking about the social and linguistic effects of mass mediated communication and that they merit another look.3 For example, in large-scale societies, a high frequency of interaction and density of communication do occur in a vertical sense - that is, the dominant direc- tionality of mass media - even if they do not occur in a lateral sense - that is, the typical (or idealized) directionality of face-to-face communication. Thus people have frequent interactions or frequent acts of consumption with certain media forms, even if they do not directly interact with other users of the same media. Similarly, there is a density of communication in the sense that there is large-scale exposure to a common communication form, such as simultaneous listening to a radio drama or a newscast. And finally, as suggested earlier, questions concerning the production of shared linguis- tic knowledge, while greatly vexed, can be productively reworked to include analysis of how certain institutions provide common linguistic refer- ence points.

Mediating Communities

These various features - common reference points, frequency of con- sumption, common exposure, simultaneity - are not adequate, however, to ensure that mass media will contribute to the formation of a community (speech or otherwise) in large-scale societies. The mass mediation of large- scale societies requires that some experience of belonging and mutuality be generated as well. Anderson's notion of the imagined community is useful in this regard, because it provides a model of a community where members

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164 Journal of Linguistic Anthropology

may not all know one another but all share an idea of belonging to a collectivity, that is, "in the minds of each lives the image of their commun- ion" (1983:15). While Anderson's work has been criticized for its idealized model of a fairly homogeneous, egalitarian, and equally believed in com- munity (Bhabha 1994; Gal 1995; Spitulnik 1994a), it is still extremely valu- able because it demonstrates how linguistic practices create possibilities for shared identities to be imagined. For example, Anderson (1983:33-36) discusses how, through both defi-

nite description and generic reference (naming familiar places and invoking types of places and types of persons), the 18th-century novel constructed a sense of a shared world, a common social and cultural milieu that belonged to both author and reader and to a collective readership. In contrast to the book, the newspaper enabled such simultaneous mass consumption of an identical communication form to occur on a daily basis, as modern man's "substitute for morning prayers" (Anderson 1983:39). Anderson argues that these new communication forms helped to create the feeling of belong- ing to a shared but anonymous community of fellow readers. These insights into the mass mediation of communal identity are impor-

tant because they point out how community and belonging are indexically constructed in texts. The major drawback of Anderson's work, however, is that it overemphasizes the power of verticál modes of communication at the expense of lateral communication. For example, we learn little about the practices of consumption and even less about what people are saying to each other about their experiences of consumption. Instead, reminiscent of the earlier "hypodermic" models of media effects and media power (see Spitulnik 1993), there is a privileging of a one-way directionality from a mass communication form to the masses, who supposedly receive it and consume it. The implicit assumption is that, as soon as this mass-produced communication form (e.g., a novel or a newspaper) is distributed, it is simultaneously participated in and almost automatically produces a feeling of a shared collectivity because of specific textual features. While textual acts of asserting or indexing collective identity are impor-

tant, they do not guarantee that this identity actually corresponds to any- thing at the experiential level. Production is only half of the picture. We need also to factor in what is happening at the levels of reception and lateral communication, such as the social circulation of media discourse outside of contexts of direct media consumption. I suggest in the following that the repeating, recycling, and recontextualizing of media discourse is an impor- tant component in the formation of community in a kind of subterranean way, because it establishes an indirect connectivity or intertextuality across media consumers and across instances of media consumption. Returning to the earlier discussion about speech communities, then, this indicates that even for large-scale societies, it is possible to speak of a density of commu- nication and frequency of interaction in a lateral sense. That is, there can be a density and frequency of common communications and cross-linkages, mediated in a transitive fashion by mass media, without a high density or frequency of direct communication between all members of a society.

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Social Circulation of Media Discourse 165

Public Words and the Semiotics of Circulation

The social circulation of media discourse provides a clear and forceful demonstration of how media audiences play an active role in the interpre- tation and appropriation of media texts and messages. It is possible to investigate these processes in semiotic terms, and recent work on genre and performance theory offers a very valuable starting point. For example, of the many important semiotic questions that Bauman and Briggs (1990; Briggs and Bauman 1992) raise in their discussions of decontextualized (decentered) and recontextualized (recentered) discourse, three are particu- larly pertinent for studying the circulation of media discourse: How are decontextualization and recontextualization possible? What does the re- contextualized text bring with it from its earlier context(s) (e.g., what kind of history does it carry with it)? What formal, functional, and semantic changes does it undergo as it is recentered? (Bauman and Briggs 1990:72-75; Briggs and Bauman 1992:141 ff.).

The following analysis of how media language is recontextualized, rein- terpreted, and played with in everyday discourse, focuses specifically on the recycling of radio expressions such as program titles, broadcasters' trademark phrases, and broadcasters' turn-taking routines. These phrases are in English and ChiBemba, two of the country's most widely spoken lingua francas and two of the eight languages that are sanctioned for use on national radio (Spitulnik 1992). 4 The data on recycled media discourse considered here stem from dialogue that I either participated in or over- heard during ethnographic research in the capital city of Lusaka and in the semiurban/semirural provincial capital of Kasama; it was not elicited and was not studied systematically across a structured sample population. The data on media discourse stem from listening notes on and recordings of radio broadcasts from the three channels of Radio Zambia - Radio 1, Radio 2, Radio 4 - which are part of the Zambia National Broadcasting Corpora- tion (ZNBC). The linguistic significance of radio in Zambia is substantial because it is the most widely consumed medium in the country, it is a primary site for exposure to English, and it is the only widespread mass communication form that uses Zambian languages.5 Furthermore, given the fact that Radio Zambia is a centralized state-run monopoly with simul- taneous national transmission (i.e., there is no regional broadcasting), the same broadcasts are accessible to the entire national population at the same time and, thus, allow for the possibility of producing a degree of shared linguistic knowledge across a population of roughly 9.1 million.

As we investigate the semiotics of how this radio discourse circulates, four basic issues will concern us: (1) the inherent reproducibility and transportability of radio phrases; (2) the "dialogic [or intertextual] over- tones" (Bakhtin 1986:92) that are carried over into the new context of use; (3) the formal, functional, and semantic alterations that occur in the recon- textualization; and (4) the degree to which knowledge of the original radio source is relevant for understanding the recycled phrase. We will see, for example, that many recycled radio phrases have a formal "prepared-for detachability" (Bauman and Briggs 1990:74), which enables them to be

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166 Journal of Linguistic Anthropology

circulated in particular ways in everyday discourse. We will also see that there is a degree of semantic open-endedness and flexibility that fosters an ease of recontextualization and that people actively exploit this semantic flexibility to create their own meanings for radio-derived discourse. Overall, the cases considered here exemplify how radio is a source and

reference point for phrases and tropes which circulate across communities. Many of these are so well-known and standardized that knowledge of them is virtually essential for one to be considered a communicatively competent member of a particular society or subculture. As such, they are part of what can be termed a society's (or a subculture's) "public words." Public words, understood in this sense, are nothing particularly new to the world or to linguistic anthropologists, and they exist in societies of all scales and scopes. They are standard phrases such as proverbs, slogans, cliches, and idiomatic expressions that are remembered, repeated, and quoted long after their first utterance. Some public words are anonymous and unattributable, for oth- ers the sources may be well or vaguely known and perhaps even invoked. Often, these public words are condensations or extracts from much longer speech events, and when used, they may function metonymically to index the entire frame or meaning of the earlier speech situation (Basso 1990a, 1990b; Urban 1991). In the United States such words are the stuff of popular culture, endlessly recycled and renewed by mass media, politicians, culture critics, bumper stickers, and the young and trendy. Examples include: "Make my day," "Been there," "Big brother (is watching)," "The buck stops here," "Beam me up (Scotty), "Play it again, Sam," and "Hasta la vista, baby." 6

While linguistic anthropology has tended to focus on the analysis of narrative, oratory, ritual speech, and other very well bounded and easily identifiable speech genres, little has been said about the smaller, scattered pieces of formulaic language, for example, the public words of street signs, graffiti, and political parties, or the popular extracts from radio, film, and the world of advertising. I argue here that tuning into these smaller genres or "minor media" (Fischer and Abedi 1990:335 ff.) is one productive avenue for beginning an analysis of the linguistic intertextuality of contemporary societies. Further, I suggest that for large-scale societies from the city to the nation and even the global village, the pervasive connections among these smaller genres (and between them and the larger genres) is actually a key constitutive and integrating feature of what can be called a community.

Recycling Metapragmatic Discourse

Many of the public words inspired by Zambian broadcasters are actually more than just single expressions; they are interactional routines and, in particular, dyadic exchanges that are about the communication event itself. Radio broadcasters are faced with the fairly unique condition of having to generate and maintain an ongoing flow of communication in the absence of a face-to-face context and within the constraints of an entirely aural medium. As with telephone communication or other modes of radio use (e.g., in the taxi-driving profession), cues such as gaze and gesture are

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Social Circulation of Media Discourse 16 7

simply not available for assessing whether the channel is open and working or whether one's intended interlocutor is listening. Because of these par- ticular contextual constraints, several types of metapragmatic discourse are extremely pervasive in radio broadcasting.7 Many of these expressions constitute broadcasters' channel-monitoring and turn-taking routines. Other types are designed explicitly to build audience expectations and involvement. For example, broadcasting requires title announcements and other framing devices to demarcate what would otherwise be a continuous flow of voices and sound. The frequent practices of entitling and announc- ing function as important contextualization cues about what listeners should expect; they also serve as key signposts for listeners who have fluctuating attention or who enter into a speech event that is already underway. Metapragmatic discourse is not the only kind of discourse which is

recycled from the realm of radio into contexts of face-to-face communica- tion, but it is readily seized upon. Why is this so? This is an open question and certainly one that requires more extensive research. Three explanations are proposed here as the most likely candidates. First, as Silverstein (1992:67 ff.) has argued, metapragmatic discourse has a particular kind of transpar- ency of both form and function. Because it explicitly serves to frame and orchestrate communication, it tends to be more subject to awareness and segmentation than other linguistic forms (Silverstein 1976:49 f., 1992, 1993). Second, since metapragmatic discourse is speech about speaking, it is easily transferable to other speech contexts. For example, in many of the cases considered below, the significant feature that enables the decontextualiza- tion and recontextualization of metapragmatic discourse is its general appli- cability to virtually any kind of dyadic exchange. And third, I suggest that the detachability and the repeatability of a given radio expression can be fueled by the medium itself, as it lends prominence to the phrase, for example, through frequent occurrence or through association with colorful personalities, heightened drama, or humorous moments. It is especially in these latter cases that the transportability of a radio phrase is driven by the specific connotations that it has in the original context. This is illustrated in our first example.

Checking the Channel

Nearly all national broadcasting in Zambia emanates from the capital city of Lusaka, but every Monday through Friday four hours of broadcasting on Radio 2 (one of the English-language channels) are handled by the Kitwe studios in the Zambian Copperbelt region. When the Lusaka broadcaster is getting ready to "cross over to the Kitwe studios," that is, hand over operations to the Kitwe-based broadcaster, he or she may say: "Kitwe, are you there?," "Kitwe, can you hear me?," or "Hello, Kitwe?" If all goes smoothly, the Kitwe-based broadcaster responds affirmatively, with greet- ings, thanks, and good-byes to the Lusaka broadcaster. If the connection is not good, however, several awkward seconds of airtime may be spent checking the channel, with the Lusaka-based broadcaster repeating the

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168 Journal of Linguistic Anthropology

metapragmatic phrases: "Hello, hello?/' "Kitwe, are you there?/' "Kitwe, can you hear me?," or "Hello, Kitwe?" This scenario is rather common at ZNBC (temporary linkup failures occur almost weekly), and thus it is no surprise that the Kitwe crossover itself can serve as an analogy for tempo- rarily failed communication, as illustrated in the following vignette. One day I was shopping in a very large and crowded Lusaka store, and

I noticed a woman trying to get the attention of a friend standing in the next aisle. She was whispering loudly in the friend's direction, "Hello, hello? Hello?" The friend didn't respond, and the woman, a bit embarrassed over drawing attention to herself while still not able to attract the friend, laughed and shouted, "Hello, Kitwe?" This definitely got the attention of the friend, as well as several other customers, who were clearly amused by this clever allusion to the bungled ZNBC communication link.8 How is the recontextualization of a radio phrase made possible in this

comic scene? Primarily, the successful recycling of "Hello Kitwe?" rests on the transposition of two basic components of the original radio event: (1) the existence of two interlocutors at different locales (Lusaka : Kitwe :: aisle 1 : aisle 2), and (2) uncertainty about the existence of a shared channel. Furthermore, knowledge of the original radio source is essential for under- standing the recycled expression. "Kitwe" is not a personal name; it is the place name for a city on the Zambian Copperbelt. On radio, "Kitwe" metonymically functions as the proper name of the broadcaster and/or studio based in the city of Kitwe. In the context of a Lusaka store, however, there is no obvious link between an individual shopper and the name "Kitwe." Unless, of course, one understands it, within the vocative con- struction, as an echoing of the well-known radio scenario. "Kitwe" then becomes a name for a person who is hard of hearing.9 The remarkable humor here is further enhanced by the fact that the sequence "Hello, hello? Hello, Kitwe? Kitwe, can you hear me?" has no other context besides the famous radio interaction. The entire expression is uniquely identified with its context of occurrence, and this identification is what triggers the parodie mood that results from the expression's unusual displacement.

T urn-T aking Routines

While the previous example represents what may be a single, idiosyn- cratic, instance of radio-discourse recycling - and one that I just happened to overhear in an urban store - there are numerous cases of recycled radio phrases that have become fairly ordinary and that occur in a wide range of social contexts. One of these is the title of the popular radio program Over to You , which runs in six different languages and which has been running in English for over 30 years.10 In this program a team of two broadcasters alternate as disc jockeys and signal the handing over of speaker role by uttering the phrase "Over to you." One broadcaster is based in the Lusaka studios, and the other is in the Kitwe studios. The program features musical selections, many of which are listeners' requests accompanied by their dedications and greetings, and the witty exchange between the two broad- casters. In the show, uttering "Over to you" creates an opening for the

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Social Circulation of Media Discourse 169

transfer of speaker role, in which the co-DJ will select a song or read a listener's letter.

In the Zambian-language programs, the title and turn-taking phrase is phonologically assimilated from English: Ovata yu (ChiNyanja) and Ofata yu (ChiBemba).11 The phrase's assimilation into Zambian culture is also evidenced by the completeness of its linguistic assimilation. In many us- ages, especially among speakers who do not know English, the phrase functions as a Zambian-language expression with no connotations of for- eign origin.

As with the successful recycling of "Hello, Kitwe?", the use of "Over to you" outside the context of radio requires that certain components of the original radio event also be in place. There must be another person to assume the speaker role, and there must be an expectation that the other speaker perform in some way. Four brief ethnographic examples illustrate this usage.

In a ChiBemba speaking context during a traditional Bemba marriage preparation ceremony, one of the prominent elder women who had been leading a series of songs in ChiBemba addressed a group of women sitting on the opposite side of the room: "Ofata yu," she said, expecting that the addressees would select and lead the next song. In an analogous, but more "modern" and urban setting in Lusaka, I witnessed the use of the idiom again in the context of song turn- taking among women instructors/ advi- sors. This was at a prewedding "kitchen party," an event that merges the traditional wedding preparations with the European-derived bridal shower. In this case, the family and the elder women were upper-class and highly fluent speakers of English. The ceremonial songs were in ChiBemba, but the turns were signaled with the English "Over to you." I came across yet another example of the phrase's use in the context of women singing during a practice session of a Seventh-Day Adventist choral group. After finishing an English-language song that she had selected and led, the leader of the singing group handed the hymn book to one of her colleagues and said, "Over to you".

A final instance of the use of this expression occurred on a letter that I received from a neighbor in Kasama. Written along the bottom of an envelope addressed to me and handed to me by the writer, a 14-year-old girl, was the phrase "Over '2' you, D.S." The young girl, whom I had just met a few days earlier, was very interested in becoming my pen pal and was hoping that she might be able to visit me in the United States. Her written recontextualization of the radio idiom added a special flair to the hand-delivered envelope, as it both foregrounded and played with the form of the phrase. The symbol 2 took the place of its homonym to, and this deviation was acknowledged with quotation marks. In addition, my per- sonal initials were appended to the construction in a form analogous to the way that radio disc jockeys identify themselves and each other. This clev- erly elaborated on the transposition of the radio speech event to the context of personal letter writing, and further indexed the young girl's conversancy with the latest trends in popular expressions.

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170 Journal of Linguistic Anthropology

Returning to our questions about the semiotics of circulation, what is transported in the recentering of "Over to you" (and its variants) is the basic discourse format of turn exchange combined with a performance format in which the animation of a different genre is embedded. The data here suggest that the phrase is primarily tied to the turn-taking contexts of song choice and letter-reading/ writing, both of which are elemental in the radio program. But to what degree is knowledge of the radio source crucial for understanding "Ofata yu" and "Over to you" in these contexts? For the most part, these phrases have filtered into popular usage, and attributabil- ity to a radio source is not as necessary for interpretability as it is with the phrase "Hello, Kitwe." It is only in the final example that knowledge of the radio program really enhances the interpretation of the utterance. Here, the radio context is invoked with special written flourishes such as abbrevia- tions and quotation marks. The message on the envelope is interpretable without knowledge of its intertextuality with the radio program and disc- jockey nicknames, but awareness of these links is crucial for a full appre- ciation of the form and its potential currency for a young girl writing to acquire an American pen pal.

"Getting It" from Radio

Many of the popular phrases inspired by radio broadcasting have a distinctive kind of symbolic value because of their association with the medium, which itself is a site of innovation, word play, and colorful drama. Young Zambians, in particular, closely attend to the linguistic nuances of radio and creatively poach from radio discourse to make their own trendy formulations. The following example of recontextualized metapragmatic discourse illustrates how such processes work and raises larger questions about the media-external forces that propel the recycling of media lan- guage.

When a ChiBemba broadcaster is handing over operations to another broadcaster or when a live reporter is linked in from an outside location, the following exchange may occur on air:12

(1) Mwaikata line? 'Do you have the line?' Ninjikata 'I've got (it)/

The verb root -ikata means "hold," "grasp," or "catch"; thus this interchange refers to the grasping of a transmission link. Among young Zambians, however, the radio-derived phrase " Mwaikata line?" has been transformed into a popular slang expression that focuses on the successful relay of the message rather than the successful link up of the physical channel:

(2) Waikata line? 'Do you understand?' 'Do you get me?'

In addition to this semantic shift, the original radio phrase also undergoes a formal change as it is recontextualized. The expressions in (1) and (2) differ in the second-person form. The radio utterance in (1) utilizes the second- person plural form {mu-, assimilated as mw-) in reference to single address-

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Social Circulation of Media Discourse 171

ees. This polite usage (V of T /V) is mandatory for radio announcers in such contexts. In the slang usage in (2), however, the second-person singular form (w-, assimilated as w-) is more appropriate for single addressees as it connotes familiarity and informality. Linguistic evidence suggests that the recyclability of the radio expression

"Mwaikata line?" as "Waikata line?" is supplemented, or even motivated, by two other key factors that are external to the original radio context: (1) other usages of the verb -ikata within Zambian popular culture and (2) the existence of a more general paradigmatic set of slang expressions for "getting it." Regarding the first factor, the verb -ikata features prominently in idioms of relay (both channel relay and message relay) during musical performances, for example, in the imperative phrase "ikata, ikata" 'grab, grab'. This phrase occurs as part of a chorus or transition point where one musician is inviting another musician to come in, that is, to seize the beat or to take the opportunity to do a special solo. Such musical relays are analogous to the announcer relay in (1), where one performer hands over the stage to another. During a performance, "ikata, ikata" 'grab, grab' can also be an exhortation to the listeners to "get it" or "dig it." Here, the meaning is more analogous to that of the slang usage (2), which focuses on addressee's comprehension or engagement. The second motivating factor outside of the realm of radio - the existence

of other related slang expressions for "getting it" - also raises an important question about the cosmopolitan connotations of recontextualized radio phrases. Significantly, the slang phrase "Waikata line?" joins a host of other nearly synonymous code-mixed expressions within Zambian youth culture such as:

(3) Naugeta? 'Do you[sg] get (me/it)?' Namugeta? 'Do you[pn get (me/it)?' Naudiga? 'Do you[sg] dig (me/it)?' Namudiga ? 'Do you[pi] dig (me/it)?'

In these popular phrases, the English verbs get and dig have been morpho- logically incorporated as ChiBemba verb roots. They are inflected with the present perfect tense (na-), the second-person singular or plural subject markers (u-, mu-), and the indicative suffix (-a). But they are not phonologi- cally assimilated (the consonants g and d would undergo devoicing), and thus they retain the indexical link with their fashionable English counter- parts "Do ya get me?" and "Do you dig it?" The recontextualized radio phrase is not therefore an isolated linguistic innovation; it participates in a more general pattern of similar expressions for interpersonal rapport within Zambian youth culture.

These two motivating factors highlight the critical fact that radio is not the be-all and end-all for putting a phrase into motion. Indeed, they gener- ate a crucial modification of Gumperz's important observation that "mass media and the prestige of their speakers tend to carry idioms far from their sources" (1971:223), one that is consistent with other principles of dia- chronic linguistics. Specifically, we see here that the social circulation of

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172 Journal of Linguistic Anthropology

media discourse is often propelled by other (media-external) linguistic lines of influence of many different orders (e.g., structural, pragmatic, sociolin- guistic, paradigmatic, analogic, ideological, etc.) that must be accounted for as well.

This point then leads us to a final question, about the sociolinguistic significance of the codeswitching in the expressions "Mwaikata line?" and "Waikata line?". How does this factor into the processes of recycling media discourse? In Zambia, as well as in many parts of the world, the strategic use of codeswitching has the potential to function as "a sign of social distinction or urbanity" (Kashoki 1978b:94; also see Gumperz 1982 and Myers-Scotton 1993). It is important to note, however, that not all code- switching is necessarily trendy or exceptional. It may be a relatively normal and unmarked feature of urban speech (Swigart 1994), or it may be fairly ordinary as in utterance (1): "Mwaikata line?". Here, in the context of a ChiBemba broadcast, the usage of line is motivated by a lexical gap and is thus more a case of borrowing than of codeswitching. Line is simply a technical word imported from the realm of modern utilities, for example, electricity, telephone, water, sanitation, and broadcasting. By contrast, the blend of ChiBemba and English in (2) is more marked and unusual. Indeed, it is the basic index of the expression's trendiness. This sociolinguistic difference between (1) and (2) thus demonstrates how recentered radio phrases may also undergo subtle functional changes in addition to semantic and formal ones.

Entitling and Naming

Radio program titles constitute another form of metapragmatic discourse which - comparable to the various interpersonal expressions discussed above - has a high degree of transparency of form and function. Titles also have a certain prominence derived from frequent repetition and their placement within the flow of broadcasting. As stated earlier, titles function as announcing, captioning, or (re)framing devices. They are designed for reproducibility and recognizability, and these factors render them particu- larly available for recontextualization in popular usage.

Even within broadcasting, program titles are recycled from other sources. For example, nearly all English-language program titles on Radio Zambia (as well as most program formats) derive from Western sources such as the BBC and the VOA: for example Main News Bulletin , The Breakfast Show , Up-to-Date, The World of Sport , and Sports Roundup}3 Most Zambian lan- guage program titles are also indebted to other external sources, and many are strikingly intertextual. For example, the ChiBemba advice program Kabuusha Taakolelwe Boowa takes its name from a well-known Bemba prov- erb meaning "the asker was not poisoned by a mushroom." The program has, in turn, become the source of coinage for the occupational title kabuusha 'advisor'. Another advice program, Baanacimbuusa 'Women Advisors', has as its source the name for the ritual leaders of the Bemba girls' initiation ceremony. And in an interesting twist on origins, the title of the comic drama series Ifyabukaaya (Things That Are Familiar' or 'Things from

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Around Here') derives its name from a ChiBemba reader constructed for basic literacy during the colonial period by the White Fathers missionaries. In short, virtually all radio titles represent a reanimation or invocation of

another source or another genre. The larger point, then, is that radio programs themselves represent a range of recyclings, transpositions, and cannibalizations of other discourse genres. Moreover, this inherent in- tertextuality of radio itself seems to be a dynamic contributing factor in the recycling of radio words outside of broadcasting and the ease with which they circulate and become recontextualized. In popular usage, radio titles are transported to everyday situations as labels for speech events, experi- ences, and even personality types. As we saw in the case of "Over to you," a radio program title is used to caption a component of a speech event, namely, the handing over of a turn. The following example illustrates how a program title can also become the title of a personal experience. One evening about 7 o'clock, my neighbor returned home from selling

buns at the market, and I asked her how her day went. Using the title of a ChiBemba radio program, she sighed, "Ah mayo, 'Imbila ya Bulanda' " [Oh dear, "News of Suffering"]. One of the most popular programs on Radio Zambia, Imbila ya Bulanda airs virtually every day and serves as a primary vehicle for individuals to send messages announcing illnesses, deaths, and funerals. Here, my neighbor was using the radio program title to entitle the events of her day. She went on to explain how all the places at the market were filled when she went there at 5:30 a.m., and how she unsuccessfully tried to maneuver for a spot. She was forced to return later in the afternoon and finally did manage to find a place to sell her baked goods, but the day had been very long and exhausting. Analogous to the Kitwe example above, this recycling injects a bit of

humor into the situation through a marked contrast with the expression's original context. The phrase "imbila ya bulanda" is unmistakably welded to the popular program that features news of death and illness; so virtually any utterance of it outside this context intertextually invokes the program. By recontextualizing the phrase as a caption for her day, my neighbor did indeed exploit the functional force of the phrase to announce that a tale of woe was forthcoming. But since these events were far less serious than those announced on radio, her entitling was hyperbolic and lent an ironic humor to the tale, which after all, had a happy ending. In addition to providing a common public source for ways of entitling

situations and experiences, media can also be a source for proper names and names of types of people (Table 1). These humorous modes of naming and labeling exhibit elements of what is a very pervasive kind of playful, ironic kind of public verbal culture in Zambia which is not limited to any particular age, locale, or language (Spitulnik 1994b). They also illustrate how active audience interpretations enter into the mediated construction of a world of familiar people, social types, and locales, as described by Anderson (1983). Some of the particular examples shown here are urban and youth based, and others are ones that originated in urban-youth slang but are now more widely used.14 The meaning and derivation of most items in Table 1 are self-evident, but the first two need some explanation.15

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Table 1 Innovative names derived from media sources

Name Meaning Media Source

By Air Boys political-party vigilantes TV commercial Chongololo pretentious, European-like Zambian radio program BaSix Koloko people from the Northwestern Province radio newscasts

(the ones whose newscasts start at 6 a.m.)

Dallas City the Lusaka neighborhood of Kabwata TV show Dallas (an upper-middle-class residential area)

Hawaii women's dorms at Copperbelt University TV show Hawaii ("because the ladies there live like they are Five-0 at a resort")

Ninja 50-kwacha bill foreign movies (the highest currency denomination in the

The labeling of party vigilantes as "By Air Boys" in the late 1980s essentially began with a television advertisement for Zambian Airways. The ad pictures a smiling customer sitting in a disembodied plane seat floating across the sky, while the announcer talks about the pleasure of traveling "by air" with Zambia Airways. This striking image of the floating customer was then applied to the way that the party vigilantes remove illegal traders from local marketplaces.16 Once discovered without the proper papers, the marketeer is lifted on both sides and is suddenly whisked away by the vigilantes while still in a sitting position, much like the man in the ad who somehow floats across the screen while seated in a chair.

The story of chongololo also illustrates the creative reworking of a media name that imports distinctive imagery from the original source. The Wild- life Conservation Society of Zambia and Bata Shoe Company sponsor a children's program entitled Chongololo ("centipede" in ChiNyanja), which is produced in ChiNyanja, ChiBemba, and English. This educational pro- gram features two or three adult hosts who discuss the habits and habitats of Zambian wildlife. Interspersed with their comments, fictional outings, and the sound effects of wild animals are songs about animals sung by a chorus of children. Listeners can become members of the Chongololo Radio Club of the Air by submitting their answers to the question "Why is it so important for us to conserve nature?" In all three languages, the program opens and closes with the children's chorus singing their theme song in English:

Chongololo , it's our favorite club. Chongololo, it's the club we love.

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Come and join us on this show, and you'll have lots of fun. Learn about the living things [clap] under the sun.17

In popular Zambian slang, chongololo has become a term for Zambians who try to speak like Europeans. The English-language program is hosted by a British male who is typically joined by two Zambian females, all of whom speak with a slow and deliberate British Received Pronunciation (RP) accent. The Zambian children on the program also speak this form of English very well for their ages (roughly 8 to 12 years old) and thus sound particularly precocious and privileged. Even in the ChiBemba and ChiNy- anja programs, this is reflected in the English theme song. One young Zambian explained to me:

Chongololo is a word for Zambians who try to adopt a foreign accent so that to a Zambian they sound like they are Europeans, while Europeans on the other hand fail to understand what they say. . . . [University of Zambia] students say, "They speak in tongues/'

A less affected form of Zambian English (with a phonology closer to that of Zambian languages) is preferred by most Zambians, even by those who are highly educated and frequently exposed to the English of Europeans and Americans. For example, a 20-year-old student at a technical training college walked into the dormitory common room to watch the television news (which is always in English) and declared in ChiNyanja:

Ah, lelo niza nvelako news cifukwa si achongololo amene azabelenga. [Oh, today I'm going to listen to the news because iťs not the chongololos reading it.]

The young man clearly approved of the pronunciation of the two newscast- ers; presumably if they had spoken like chongololos, he would have walked out.

Not only is the Zambian chongololo guilty of having a fake accent, but he or she is also guilty of going to the extreme in mimicking European dress and behavior. This takes on class dimensions, as one university student told me, "A chongololo is the child of an apamwamba [upper class person]/' Another put it more extremely: " 'Chongies' are victims of bourgeois capitalist ideology. They speak with American accents." 18 The negative behavior of the chongololo thus extends beyond a verbal style of "speak[ing] in tongues" to include the desire for a bourgeois lifestyle that is beyond the reach of most Zambians. Indeed, the actual content of the Chongololo program itself - observing birds in nature, appreciation of the world of insects, tourism within Zambia, and concern with wildlife preser- vation - emblematizes this essentially un-Zambian outlook.

What kinds of semiotic processes are at work in this recontextualization of a program title as a personal stereotype? First, there are certain formal linguistic conditions that support it. Analogous to the Kitwe example, this recontextualization is based on both metonymy and the existence of a shared lexical category (proper name). The program name Chongololo is also the club name, and club members - or people like them - are metonymi-

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cally designated as chongololos or chongies. In addition, the recycling imports several features of the original radio context into its negative connotations: the mode of speaking, upper-class leisure activities, and a Western-oriented outlook. Moreover, the very concept of the radio program as a club that can be joined furthers the implicit critique that the show and the chongololo represent an exclusive sector of Zambian society. The Chongololo Radio Club of the Air, as a club for chongololos, in essence constitutes a distinct speech community where members share a common norm of English language usage (i.e., RP). The point of contention, and what motivates the negative stereotype, is whether this speech community has the rightful claim to also represent the linguistic community of English within Zambia. While the program's speakers do adhere to a "culture of the standard" (Silverstein 1987) and view themselves as exemplifying proper English usage - particularly as they are guided by a male British program host - most Zambians reject this as a model for how Zambians should speak English.

Poaching from Personalities

In contrast to the Chongololo show, numerous other radio programs provide very attractive models of speech styles which are emulated and invoked in more positive ways. In many cases, these styles and linguistic innovations are actually the trademarks of a particular radio personality. The uniqueness of such radio personalities is to a great degree built upon this verbal creativity, a creativity that is at the same time relatively predict- able since it is recognizable as a personal style. In many instances this very reputation and visibility is what subsequently propels the adoption of broadcasters' linguistic innovations within popular culture (see Gumperz 1971:223). Some of these recycled innovations retain the indexical link to the individual broadcaster's speech style, and others have been absorbed more widely into popular usage. In the following we look at a few examples of this popular adoption of broadcasters' speech innovations and habits.

Dennis Liwewe, Zambia's most famous sports announcer, is renowned for his fast speech, innovative descriptions, and dramatic delivery. His broadcasts are almost always in English, and his mode of speaking has become a model and a reference point for certain phrasings, even beyond the area of sports. For example, one very common Liwewe phrase during football (soccer) games combines the word situation with one or two num- bers:

(4) Ifs a one-zero situation. (5) Bwalya comes into the Zaire zone. Iťs a one-two situation.

In utterance (4), situation refers to the score. A one-zero situation is thus a score of one to zero. In (5), situation refers to the positions on the playing field. That is, there is one offensive player - Bwalya on the Zambian team - moving in against two defensive players in the Zaire zone.

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Zambians have picked up on this usage of situation and have applied it outside the realm of sports, to refer to contexts where some numerical quantity is involved. For example, I was at the University of Zambia snack bar, and a young man had been at the counter trying to get some matches to light a cigarette. He was unsuccessful and walked back to his friend, saying:

(6) 7/i/flmatches, zero situation Things [boxes] of matches, zero situation/ 'About the matches, zero situation/

The "zero situation" in this case is the unavailability of matches. While one might interpret situation here as meaning "predicament," it also has a sense analogous to the sports-specific forms in (4) and (5), as "score" or "posi- tion." The young man came up empty-handed in the search for matches; he thus failed to score and found that nothing was in position.

The recycling of the Liwewe formula "[number(-number)] situation" outside of sports talk is highly marked as creative language use. While recontextualized, it still retains an important indexical link back to its original source. This is not just a link of attribution, that is, the identification of Liwewe as the originator of the expression, but one that carries the broader associations of a "Liweweism," a phrasing that is dramatic, lively, and somewhat hyperbolic in the manner of the famous Liwewe.19 The usage of ChiBemba-English code-mixing in (6) lends an additional air of trendi- ness to the expression.

Other examples of linguistic innovations stemming from specific radio personalities include the words get and dig as idioms for "understand" that, as discussed earlier, have been incorporated into the code-mixed slang expressions "Naugeta?" (Do ya get me?) and "Namudiga?" (Do you dig it?). These words emanate from the most popular Radio Zambia DJs, who are themselves recyclers, as they extract popular American and British slang from song lyrics while exhorting their listeners, talking up the re- cords, and making segues between selections. Many DJs also exemplify the pronunciations characteristic of informal American English usage (for ex- ample, strongly nasalized "gonna," "wanna," and "ya know"), and these expressions circulate quite widely among Zambian youths. The following excerpt from Radio 4 disc jockey Leonard Kantumoya, also known as "The Groove Maker" or "The GM," illustrates some of these media sources of urban slang:

Ah, when you hear the GM playing instrumentais and keeping a little quiet, you just know the hour is about to arrive and I'm about to hit the road for home, because I see my good friend Swidden Hangaala is already in. He's dug in already and he's trying to dig in even further. [Laughs.] He's gonna sweep me out of my DJ saddle. [Radio 4, February 3, 1989, emphasis added]

With this kind of fast-paced, exciting style, Zambian DJs play a pivotal role in introducing an English-language vocabulary that speaks to the mood and tempo of the modern condition. Contemporary Zambian English is

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replete with such words and idioms, many of which are not restricted to subcultural usage and many of which have origins as far back as the 1940s. Some of the most popular of these are the words jive, jazz, super , live, nonstop , beat, and rap. In this sense, radio - in conjunction with popular music that is often the original site of such vocabulary - has played a key role not only in introducing new lexical items but in structuring an entire semantic field that denotes excitement and entertainment.

Broadcasters' Recyclings: The Case of Personal Titles

The preceding discussion has touched on several instances where media professionals themselves recontextualize and reanimate phrases that origi- nate in other contexts, for example, program titles that stem from indige- nous oral traditions and Western media sources, and disc-jockey speech registers that draw from popular song lyrics and the styles of DJs heard on foreign stations. In this sense, not only does radio serve as model of normative language use and as a springboard for linguistic innovations within popular culture, it is also a dynamically intertextual site in which an existing repertoire of public words is continually being modified and elaborated upon. This section examines one final case of broadcasters' recyclings, one that illustrates the possibilities of political parody within broadcasting.

All radio disc jockeys have at least one nickname that they regularly use; most of these are boasts of some sort, and many are creative twists on political titles or other titles associated with high status. For example, the late Peter Mweemba went by the name "Brother PM," a combination of his personal initials and an American-derived term for solidary males.20 In the Zambian context, this coinage is particularly striking, because PM also designates the third highest ranking politician in the country, the Prime Minister.21 As he cultivated his own style of casual and trendy familiarity, Brother PM played off the fact that the real PM is surrounded by the exact opposite: an aura of extreme deference and seriousness. Exploiting the full force of this contrast, ZNBC management actually orchestrated the meeting of Brother PM and the real PM on national radio, by inviting the then-Prime Minister to preside over the inauguration of a new radio channel. Peter Mweemba was the DJ on duty:

Right, this is your DJ, Brother PM, behind the microphone hoping you're ready for us, as we bring it to you, the biggest and best on FM stereo. Right, in just a few minutes' time from now, the Right Honorable Prime Minister, Kebby Musokotwane will be walking into Radio Mulungushi stereo studio, to officially switch on Radio Mulungushi. [Radio 4, February 1, 1989]

After the Prime Minister inaugurates the new radio channel, Peter Mweemba interviews him at length about the role of broadcasting. In the exchange, the two address each other as "Right Honorable Prime Minister" and "Peter." Later in the interview, Mweemba personalizes the discussion

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Social Circulation of Media Discourse 179

and focuses on the musical tastes of the Prime Minister. The PM is asked if

he has any favorites to request, and by the end of the interview, he is integrated like any other avid radio listener into the popular radio format of the deejayed greeting/request program:

Well, before I spin your records, Right Honorable Prime Minister, finally, any special greetings to your friends and family? I realize you are a national leader; so I suppose there are one or two people you'd like to say hello to.

Of course, the integration is not really complete. Mweemba does not refer to himself as "Brother PM" during this exchange, nor would we expect the real PM to use this phrase. Moreover, the list of people whom the Prime Minister wishes to greet and thank is rather unusual. He first greets his wife, then his "colleagues in Cabinet," the Zambian people, and finally the President.

In an interesting twist on both Peter Mweemba's innovation and another political abbreviation, the broadcaster Margaret Phiri uses the initials "MP" as her DJ trademark. In common parlance, MP designates a Member of Parliament. Phiri is a rather low-key broadcaster and does not really play up the political connotations of her nickname. Many listeners feel that she rather uncreatively copied Mweemba's model. Behind this, however, are some basic gender differences and expectations about speaking styles. Projecting a strong lively personality on national airwaves and, especially, the playfulness and boasting that is inherent in many DJ nicknames (e.g., "The Sweet Sensation" and "The Man with the Longest Queue in Town") is deemed more appropriate for Zambian men and less appropriate for Zambian women.

One popular radio DJ who is constantly promoting himself and coining new phrases is Leonard Kantumoya ("The Groove Maker" or "The GM"). Behind the microphone, Kantumoya talks quite a lot and often uses Ameri- can slang (circa 1970), as illustrated above. The wordplay, or abbreviation play, in his nickname builds on the fact that, in Zambia, GM is one of the most pervasive labels for the highest-ranking office in business and indus- try: the general manager. Using another abbreviation, Kantumoya dubs his music "PPS" (People Pleasing Sounds). PPS with GM is somewhat of a mixed metaphor (or mixed bureaucracy), but it is amusing in any case as it invokes the well-known title "Provincial Political Secretary." 22

In their recontextualizations of these abbreviations designating bureau- cratic structures and high offices, Zambian broadcasters display a distinc- tive sense of humor. They never directly refer to the original source of their nicknames; they only allude to it. But like political leaders and top level bureaucrats, they are, in their own realm, at the controls. They are in charge of spinning the records and making the announcements. In terms of their pragmatic structure, such DJ nicknames are most apt as uniquely identify- ing rádio trademarks or signatures, because they already have a built-in definiteness. The initials themselves presuppose the existence of a specific

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nonabbreviated form, and these nonabbreviated forms specifically desig- nate the holder of a particular office or position. As recyclings of tropes of the nation-state, these DJ nicknames illustrate

a more general point about the public sphere in Zambia. The knowledge of acronyms and abbreviations is an important part of communicative com- petence in Zambia, and this is essentially part of the postcolonial legacy.23 For example, in modern-day Zambia the most prominent positions, insti- tutions, and interests - from government offices and state services to mul- tinational corporations and foreign donor agencies - are designated by a proliferation of acronyms such as UNZA, TAZARA, ZESCO, INDECO, ZNBC, DANIDA, SIDO, FTJ, KK, PM, MP, GM, and DG.24 What appears to be a virtual alphabet soup for the uninitiated is actually a very concrete mapping and populating of the public sphere. With their own initials, Brother PM, MP, and the GM thus index not only their conversancy and sense of humor about this public sphere but also their unique membership in it: to be initialed in this way is to have a uniquely identifying description and to be counted among the ranks of the nation's leading figures.

Conclusion

This article has attempted to open up a relatively unexplored area of research at the intersection of language and culture, by investigating the social circulation of media discourse and its implications for the mediation of communities. I have argued that broadcasting functions as a common reservoir and reference point for various kinds of linguistic innovations in Zambia, ranging from the subcultural to the mainstream, from the fleeting to the perduring, and from the parodie to the mundane. Radio is a source for lexical coinage (e.g., chongies and kabuusha), idiomatic expressions (e.g., "Waikata line?"), and distinctive modes of verbal interaction (e.g., "Over to you"). It is also a resource for innovative tropes and analogies: for example, BaSix Koloko (The Six o'Clockers) as a name for members of ethnic groups whose newscasts begin daily at 6 a.m., or "Hello, Kitwe" as an address form for someone who is hard of hearing.

In addition to documenting these processes, I have made some broader semiotic generalizations about the types of media discourse that circulate and the types of conditions that enable this circulation. For example, metapragmatic discourse and, in particular, various kinds of interpersonal routines and framing devices are readily seized upon in creative rework- ings of media language. I have proposed that features such as transparency of form and function and prominence (via frequent repetition or association with dramatic moments) create a "prepared-for detachability" (Bauman and Briggs 1990:74) that enables such discourse to be circulated across communities. I have also suggested that the language of proper names and definite description (including place-names, nicknames, and abbrevia- tions), as well as generic names for social types, figure importantly in socially circulating media discourse, because they function to locate and populate a shared world, much in a manner analogous to the processes described by Anderson (1983) in reference to the 18th-century novel. And

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finally, I have suggested that these processes of circulation operate within a much larger context of a very dynamic verbal culture which itself is playful, ironic, and highly intertextual. Addressing the thorny question of the construction of communities is a

much more difficult task than discovering the various semiotic and cultural conditions that propel the social circulation of media discourse. I have claimed that mass media provide common reference points for the produc- tion of shared linguistic knowledge and that the social circulation of media discourse is just one case of the subtle linguistic connections that exist across populations that stretch over regional and national boundaries. I have proposed that criteria such as frequency of media consumption and large- scale exposure to a common media source enter into this equation and that the speech community concept can be productively refined by including these features.

As the cases considered here have intimated, the communities mediated by radio broadcasting are several. Since media discourse is not uniformly accessible or even uniformly seized upon and interpreted in the same ways, all kinds of outcomes are possible. In some instances the social circulation of media discourse occurs at the subcultural level (e.g., "Waikata line?" among urban youths), and in some instances it is more general (e.g., "Imbila ya Bulanda" and "Ofata yu"). Still other instances may be highly idiosyn- cratic, as suggested by the case of "Hello, Kitwe." Further research into the sociolinguistic distribution of recycled media discourse across age, gender, class, locale, and language is really required to answer such questions about communities more concretely.

One enduring issue throughout the discussion has been how to charac- terize the status of these phrases that circulate across and through mass media and popular culture. Following other work in linguistic anthropol- ogy (Bauman and Briggs 1990; Briggs and Bauman 1992; Lucy 1993; Silver- stein and Urban 1996), I have attempted in each case to specify the various formal conditions on, and functional effects of, such recontextualized speech. In comparison to the better-known speech genres (e.g., narrative, oratory, ritual speech, and reported speech) that feature in such studies, many of the media fragments considered here exhibit (1) a much greater mobility through various social contexts, and (2) a peculiar built-in detach- ability and reproducibility, as stated above. As they thread through differ- ent contexts of use, giving people their own voices and aesthetic pleasures, such public words hearken to speakers and contexts which are in some ways larger than life. Indeed, it is this transportability, or detachability, that allows public words to seem to have lives of their own yet also be fibers of connection across various social situations and contexts.

While some scholars might attribute this circulation of media discourse more generally to the inherent nature of mass media and/ or to a postmod- ern condition, I would challenge this. It may be true that the postmodern condition is characterized by an unprecedented fascination with icons, images, slogans, jingles, and other mass-produced objects that mass media disseminate and produce (Baudrillard 1983; Harvey 1989; Hebdige 1988; Jameson 1984). But the various practices that characterize active audiences

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such as media poaching and intertextuality (Certeau 1984; Jenkins 1992) do not seem to be particularly new. The evidence here suggests that recycling media discourse and even the existence of such "détachables" are part of a much more general process of language use, or social life of language, which intersects (but precedes) the postmodern, pop-culture era, and the advent of mass media as widespread, public communication forms. In fact, it seems equally the case that the radio recyclings discussed here are not really exemplars of a postmodern condition per se, but rather they are evidence of the more general heteroglossic nature of language. To quote Bakhtin:

[T]here are no "neutral" words and forms - words and forms that can belong to "no one"; language has been completely taken over, shot through with intentions and accents. For any individual consciousness living in it, language is not an abstract system of normative forms but rather a concrete heterglot conception of the world. All words have a "taste" of a profession, a genre ... a particular person, a generation, an age group, the day and hour. Each word tastes of the contexts in which it has lived its socially charged life. [1981:293]

As a far-reaching, ongoing, public communication form - which is itself a constant reanimator - radio broadcasting has the potential to magnify, and even create, this "socially charged life" of certain linguistic forms. I have suggested here that the study of media discourse in popular culture is one such avenue for examining the dynamism and mobility of language, and that this mobility (and mobilizability) has far-reaching implications for both language change and the construction of public cultures and speech communities which are vibrant and creative.

Notes

Acknowledgments . Earlier versions of this article were presented at the 1995 American Anthropological Association annual meeting in Washington, DC, in the session "Social Formations and Language 'Communities' " and at the "Language in the City: Public Spaces and National Dialogues" conference at New York Uni- versity in March 1994. The primary research for this article was carried out in 1988-90, supported by Fulbright-Hays and NSF fellowships, and facilitated by the Institute for African Studies at the University of Zambia. I would like to extend my sincere thanks to these institutions, and especially to Jane Hill and James Collins, the paper discussants at the two conferences. I am also grateful to the Spencer Foundation and the University Research Committee at Emory University for sup- porting various stages of this work. I am deeply indebted, as well, to many colleagues who have offered their valuable input at various writing stages, includ- ing, but not limited to, Mark Auslander, Misty Bastian, Bruce Knauft, Ben Lee, John Lucy, Mwelwa Musambachime, Bradd Shore, Michael Silverstein, and the anony- mous reviewers for the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology .

1. As an adjective, public is used here (following Urban) in a fairly neutral sense to connote wide distribution and a general openness and availability. This defini- tion contrasts in important ways with definitions of the noun public , or the public , as an ideological construct concerning state-citizen relations or corporation- consumer relations (Calhoun 1992; Gal 1995:417 f.; Gal and Woolard 1995; Spitulnik 1994a). For discussions of how these two are linked, that is, how public availability

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Social Circulation of Media Discourse 183

of certain communication forms figures into the ideological construction of publics, see Gal and Woolard 1995 and Spitulnik 1994a, 1994b. 2. For electronic media, the semantics of the term broadcast (which originated

from the realm of agriculture) encapsulates this important sense of widespread distribution.

3. See Irvine 1987 for a discussion of the history of the speech community concept and its various definitions, revisions, shortcomings, and merits. Probably the most strongly debated issues concern the importance of shared knowledge of a linguistic code, including shared knowledge of norms for usage and interpretation (Gumperz 1971) and the related emphasis on the homogeneity of the speech community. For example, several scholars have pointed out that linguistic and sociolinguistic knowledge is not evenly shared across communities (Irvine 1987; Parkin 1994), despite a dominant ideology of sharedness in many cases (Silverstein 1987; also see the other contributions to this ]LA issue). In contrast, the criteria of density and frequency of interaction have been omitted, more than debated, perhaps because of their problematic nature for large-scale societies and their behaviorist connota- tions stemming from Bloomfield, the originator of the speech community concept.

4. ChiBemba is the name for the language of the Bemba people, BaBemba, who constitute roughly 19 percent of Zambia's national population (Kashoki 1978a). More than half of the nation's 9.1 million inhabitants speak ChiBemba (56 percent of the national population, according to Kashoki 1978a), and at least one-quarter speak English (26 percent according to Kashoki 1978a, and 45 percent according to Claypole and Daka 1993). Approximately 69 percent of all national radio broadcast- ing is in English, and 6 percent is in ChiBemba (Spitulnik 1992).

5. According to a national media survey conducted in 1991, 57% of all Zambians own a working radio, 74% listen at least once per week, and 63% listen daily or almost daily. By sharp contrast, only 17% own TVs and 30% view TV at least once a week (Claypole and Daka 1993:63-64).

6. For a discussion of this last phrase, see Hill 1993. 7. Metapragmatic discourse is speech that is about the communication context

or about the functions of language in context: for example, "Here's what I want to tell you. . . ," "I didn't hear what you just said," and "Stop lecturing me." As speech about speaking, metapragmatic discourse functions to both regiment and frame the interpretation of the ongoing speech event (Silverstein 1976, 1993).

8. Media discourse about mistakes and failures is a common target of comic recycling. For example, ZNBC radio and TV frequently broadcast public service announcements for the national electric company regarding temporary power outages. The phrase "Any inconvenience caused is deeply regretted" is a standard feature of such announcements and can be humorously recast in other speech contexts. For an example on the World Wide Web, see Ranjit Warrieťs rendering of the Zambian English version as "Any inconvenience caused is diply regraitted" in reference to his homepage's possibly strange appearance through non-Netscape browsers (Warrier 1996b).

9. The complex humor of this exchange is even more elaborate for those who know the etymology of place-name "Kitwe" in Lamba, the language indigenous to the Copperbelt region. Kitwe is an abbreviation of a Lamba expression for "big ear." The place was named after an historical event involving an elephant.

10. In the late 1980s, versions of Over to You aired on Thursdays in Luvale, on Saturdays in English and ChiLunda, and on Sundays in ChiBemba, ChiNyanja, and ChiTonga.

1 1 . Further investigation is required to determine the precise morpheme bounda- ries in these assimilated phrases. My representation is based on a hypothesis that

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184 Journal of Linguistic Anthropology

the first three syllables are one word and that you is analyzed as a demonstrative pronoun for third-person singular, in an analogy with yu (ChiNyanja) and uyu (ChiBemba) 'this person', 'heť, 'him'. 12. In the examples, italicized words are ChiBemba (unless otherwise noted), and

nonitalicized words are English. 13. Further examples of foreign-derived titles on Radio Zambia include This Is

My Song , My Old Favorites , Yours for the Asking , and other titles based on fill-in-the- blank formulas such as X's Corner ( Children's Corner , Women's Corner, and Poet's Corner) and X's Magazine (Women's Magazine). 14. More specific sociolinguistic questions about the significance of each form

remain open for further research, since their usage and distribution were not systematically studied.

15. In addition to these more innovative names, Zambian media are also a popular source for personal names, for example, names for newborns and names that teenagers adopt for themselves. During the late 1980s the names Jeff and Pam were very popular, as they derived from the American television series Dynasty and Dallas running on TV-Zambia.

16. At the time, the party vigilantes were members of the country's ruling (and sole) party, the United National Independence Party (UNIP).

17. The closing song substitutes the last two verses with: "Now it's time to say good-bye to our friends far and near. Before we go leťs give our wildlife a great big cheer. Yeah!"

18. This quote points to the difficulty in precisely defining the chongololo accent. In the radio program the broadcasters' accents are RP, and the children's accents approximate this. But outside of radio, many forms of non-Zambian English count as chongololo accents, including ones that sound like a blend of American and British varieties. As one reviewer of this article noted, the perception that chongies have American accents maybe linked, via ideological pressures, to the identification of speakers as "capitalists."

19. Liwewe's most famous phrase is his characteristic wild yell, "It's a gooooooooaaal!!!" For an electronic poaching of this, see Warrier 1996a.

20. Peter Mweemba's use of brother has several possible connotations and may stem from idioms of Christian brotherhood and /or from African American usage.

21. Political positions and rankings have changed somewhat under the current Chiluba government. At the time of fieldwork, during the one-party system, the secretary-general of the ruling party ranked second after the Zambian president.

22. During the period of one-party rule, this was the title for the second-highest government position at the provincial level.

23. The creative poaching of such abbreviations, acronyms, and state slogans is pervasive in Zambia and throughout much of Africa (Mbembe 1992; Spitulnik 1994b). One example of this is illustrated by the renderings of the abbreviation "IFA," which is on the front of the large Zambian army trucks manufactured by the IFA company (of the former East Germany). Because these vehicles are involved in so many fatal road accidents, the name is interpreted as designating "International Funeral Association/ Ambassadors," or imfwa 'death'.

24. Respectively, these stand for University of Zambia, Tanzania-Zambia Rail- way, Zambia Electric Supply Corporation, Industrial Development Corporation, Zambia National Broadcasting Corporation, Danish International Development Agency, Small Industries Development Organisation, Frederick T. J. Chiluba (the current president), Kenneth Kaunda (the former president), Prime Minister, Mem- ber of Parliament, General Manager, and Director General.

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Social Circulation of Media Discourse 185

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