1st Edition
A Sociolinguistics of the South
This book brings to life initiatives among scholars of the south and north to understand better the intelligences and pluralities of multilingualisms in southern communities and spaces of decoloniality.
Chapters follow a longue durée perspective of human co-existence with communal presents, pasts, and futures; attachments to place; and insights into how multilingualisms emerge, circulate, and alter over time. Each chapter, informed by the authors’ experiences living and working among southern communities, illustrates nuances in ideas of south and southern, tracing (dis-/inter-) connected discourses in vastly different geopolitical contexts. Authors reflect on the roots, routes and ecologies of linguistic and epistemic heterogeneity while remembering the sociolinguistic knowledge and practices of those who have gone before. The book re-examines the appropriacy of how theories, policies, and methodologies ‘for multilingual contexts’ are transported across different settings and underscores the ethics of research practice and reversal of centre and periphery perspectives through careful listening and conversation.
Highlighting the potential of a southern sociolinguistics to articulate a new humanity and more ethical world in registers of care, hope, and love, this volume contributes to new directions in critical and decolonial studies of multilingualism, and to re-imagining sociolinguistics, cultural studies, and applied linguistics more broadly.
1 A Sociolinguistics of the South
Kathleen Heugh, Christopher Stroud, Kerry Taylor-Leech, and Peter I. De Costa
Part I: Stories of the South and their Storytellers
Framing ‘Stories of the South and their Storytellers’
Christopher Stroud
2 Outside in: The Relevance of Epistemologies of the Global South for North America and the United States Amidst the Immigration Debate
Terrence Wiley
3 Roots and Routes: Meshworks of Multilingualism
Christopher Stroud and Kathleen Heugh
4 ‘We Wear the Mask’: Agentive and Strategic Language Play in Southern and Northern Spaces of (Im)mobility and Precarity
Necia Stanford-Billinghurst
5 Chican@ Studies, Chican@ Sociolinguistics: Dialogues on Decolonizing Linguistic Studies and Southern Multilingualisms
Reynaldo F. Macías
Part II: Southern Ways – Care, Hope and Love
Framing ‘Southern ways – Care, Hope and Love’
Kerry Taylor-Leech
6 Remembering as a Decolonizing Project in Language Policy
Ruanni Tupas
7 Timescales, Critical Junctures, and the Accruing Injuries of Coloniality: The Case of a Mother Tongue Pilot in Timor-Leste
Kerry Taylor-Leech
8 Bilingual Education and Multilingualism in Mozambique: A Decolonial Critique of Policies, Discourses and Practices
Feliciano Chimbutane
9 Dialogue as a Decolonial effort: Nepali Youth Transforming Monolingual Ideologies and Reclaiming Multilingual Citizenship
Prem Phyak, Hima Rawal and Peter I. De Costa
10 What can Southern Multilingualisms Bring to the Question of How to Prepare Teachers for Linguistic Diversity in Canadian Schools?
Rubina Khanam, Russell Fayant and Andrea Sterzuk
Part III: Sociolinguistic Methods of the South
Framing ‘Sociolinguistic Methods of the South’
Peter I. De Costa
11 ē-ka-pimohteyāhk nīkānehk ōte nīkān: nēhiyawēwin (Cree Language) Revitalization and Indigenous Knowledge (Re)generation
Belinda Daniels, Andrea Sterzuk, Peter Turner, William Richard Cook, Dorothy Thunder and Randy Morin
12 Desert participants Guide the Research in Central Australia
Janet Armitage
13 Aboriginal Agency, Knowledge, and Voice: Centring kulintja Southern Methodologies
Samuel Osborne
Coda: Recovring Lost Arts of Languaging from the Four Directions
Alison Phipps
Biography
Kathleen Heugh, UniSA Education Futures, University of South Australia, is a socio-applied linguist specializing in southern multilingualisms, transknowledging and multilingual literacies in post- and decolonial education, policy and planning in Africa, Asia, and Australia. Her work includes field research with displaced, post-conflict, and remote communities, system-wide assessment, evaluation, and teacher education.
Christopher Stroud is Emeritus Professor at the University of the Western Cape and Professor of Transnational Bilingualism at Stockholm University. His current research focuses on practices and ideologies of multilingualism in Southern Africa, exploring the notion of Linguistic Citizenship as a decolonial framework for language and diversity.
Kerry Taylor-Leech is an socio-applied linguist based in the School of Education and Professional Studies at Griffith University, Queensland. She has published widely on issues dealing with language policy and planning, development, identity, and language choice, particularly in Timor-Leste. She co-edits Current Issues in Language Planning Journal.
Peter I. De Costa is an Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics and Languages and the Department of Teacher Education at Michigan State University. His research areas include emotions, identity, ideology, and ethics in educational linguistics and social (in)justice issues. He is the co-editor of TESOL Quarterly.
"In A Sociolinguistics of the South, an exciting range of authors from both the global South and the global North address two key questions: Where is “the South” in sociolinguistics? What might a “sociolinguistics of the South” comprise? Readers who seek a richer understanding of decoloniality, southern multilingualisms, and the sociolinguistic methods of the South, will find the collection both compelling and visionary. Editors Heugh, Stroud, Taylor-Leech and de Costa have made a timely and important contribution to debates on power and possibility in contemporary sociolinguistics." - Professor Bonny Norton (FRSC), University of British Columbia
"This remarkable volume offers new routes for thinking with and from the epistemic South. Engaging ethically and critically with alternative histories, practices, and understandings of multilingualism, it advances a more pluriversal, expansive and invigorating socio- and applied linguistics." - Professor Caroline Kerfoot, Stockholm University
"An insightful and much needed engagement with multilingualism in the plural from the perspective of a sociolinguistics of the south. It substantially takes on the difficult dialogue with northern perspectives and reconfigures the epistemic line between what is commonly perceived as Northern transparency and Southern opacity." - Professor Lynn Mario T. Menezes de Souza, University of São Paulo
"This book unfolds a refreshing perspective on language as constitutive of our humanity /(being human). The contributors note the ‘irrepressible creativity and communality of care and love’ of the fluid multilingual societies of the South focusing on their decoloniality and ‘linguistic and epistemic heterogeneity’. In so doing, the authors re-examine the appropriacy of how theories and methodologies for multilingual contexts can cut across boundaries of the South and North reversing the centre and periphery patterns of domination." - Emeritus Professor Rama Kant Agnihotri, University of Delhi
"This timely and important volume breaks new ground by articulating a ‘sociolinguistics of the south’ as an experiential, theoretical and cosmological project. Foregrounding a decolonial politics of care, love and hope, the contributors think with – and work through – diverse temporalities and spatialities, imagining and creating a sociolinguistics that is not simply scholarly and political, but also ethical." - Professor Ana Deumert, University of Cape Town
"This timely collection of chapters helps to [...] provid[e] a comprehensive illustration of the methodological underpinnings of decolonial sociolinguistic inquiry and critical theorising through an anti-colonialist lens." - Ahmed Sahlane, University of Jeddah, ELI Jeddah
