This study investigates experiences in the learning of Swahili across two university programs in African studies, one in Dar es Salaam, and the other in Mexico City, with the goal of understanding how emerging social identities intersect with institutional language policies in the multilingual classroom. There is also the additional goal of clarifying the impact of global networks in the spread of the language from its eastern African origins to its present position in Latin America. The study unfolds as an examination of participants' classroom activities and interviews, generating an account of how multiple identities surface through discourse and investments in language learning. Data are interpreted across thematic, critical, and descriptive discourse analyses to describe how material, ideological, and symbolic groups manifest among participants; illustrate how classroom talk reproduces or resists structures of power and inequality; and show how code choices are indicative of ideologies of standardization and monolingualism. Findings are presented as microanalyses of successive, linked class meetings in each study context. These data reveal classroom speech events to be mechanisms of guiding learners into the use of English and Spanish to analyze and comment on Standard Swahili. Accordingly, participation in classroom communities of practice requires English-language knowledge in both contexts, and centers upon the acquisition of Standard Swahili communicative competence. This leads to limited opportunities for participation in Standard Swahili talk, reifying the higher status of ex-colonial languages, and undermining institutional and ideological projections of Swahili as a transcontinental language. Many thousands of miles away from Tanzania's principal economic center, the teaching of Swahili in Mexico City mirrors the teaching of the language in Dar es Salaam in that learners are guided in the rehearsal of mostly non-communicative practices in Swahili (e.g., word analysis, translation), while focusing on Tanzanian (and East African) cultural activities (e.g., storytelling) and events (e.g., the historical emergence of mumiani and Popo Bawa). These classroom practices in Swahili serve to localize learners' sensibilities and communicative competencies; Swahili thereby becomes perceived as a mostly Tanzanian language. This greatly differs with concurrent institutional rhetoric on the value of Swahili as a Pan African and global language. These circumstances differentially affect learners; in Dar es Salaam, where Austrian, Chinese, Ghanaian, Italian, South Korean, and U.S. learners choose to study Swahili as part of study abroad, their investments in language learning are steady, and relate to searches for authenticity. For Cuban, Mexican, and Venezuelan learners in Mexico City, where study of Swahili is required, investments are lowered, and academic identities are challenged. Altogether, these data provide solid evidence of South-South networks in the spread of knowledge production on Africa, which initially supported the founding of an African studies program in Mexico City, and continue to sustain the teaching of a growing contingent of new L2, L3, and L4 speakers of Swahili.
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