A Sociolinguistics of the South

Kathleen Heugh, Christopher Stroud, Kerry Taylor-Leech, Peter I. De Costa, Kathleen Heugh, Christopher Stroud, Kerry Taylor-Leech, Peter I. De Costa

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781032019468
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351805070
• Topic: Lingue e linguistica
• Subtopic: Linguistica

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

Introduction

From the perspective of peoples in southern settings, multilingualisms have always been lingue franche that shift and change along well-trodden paths of human mobility¹ with ‘multilinguality’ comprising an integral condition of what it means to be human (Agnihotri, 2014). Recent debates about the nature of linguistic diversity in sociolinguistics have brought to life initiatives among scholars of both the south and north to understand better the intelligences and pluralities of multilingualisms in southern communities and spaces. One of these initiatives emerged from the interweaving of several strands of decolonial thinking and conversations about linguistic heterogeneity that had been circulating through Africa, the Américas, South Asia, and Australia in the decades that followed the dismantling of imperial administrations post-World War II. Several of these conversations (e.g. those associated with Frantz Fanon, Léopold Senghor, and Nelson Mandela) intersected at times with those engaged in mapping postcolonial theory (e.g. Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, and Edward Said).

Others charted different routes (e.g. Mahatma Gandhi, Rodolfo Kusch, Kwame Nkrumah, Anibal Quijano) indicating a widening chasm between (neo)colonial and decolonial thinking.

An interest in multilingualism and multilinguality surfaced in the north as a response to late 20th- and early 21st-century socio-political and economic mobilities, principally in relation to educational institutions, and with a focus on deficit theories, on the one hand, and elite bilingualism (e.g. Canadian experiences of French immersion programmes), on the other. Southern contexts of multilingualisms continued as fertile sites for researchers sent for brief forays and opportunities to mine and extract linguistic resources for decontextualized northern scholarship. Yet, beyond southern communities, the centrality of multilinguality to the human condition in its conveyance and generation of knowledge and in its irrepressible creativity and communality of ‘care’, ‘love’, and ‘hope’, despite apocalyptic trauma and turbulence, remains largely concealed (Cusicanqui, 2019; Lempert, 2018; Maturana & Verden-Zöller, 2008).

Southern Multilingualisms and Diversities

In seeking the origin of Pliny the Elder’s well-known rendition of the pre-Aristotelian proverb, ‘Ex Africa semper aliquid novi’ – from Africa always something new – Ronca (1992) alerts us to 2,000 years in which interpretations of the proverb have become increasingly negative. Parrinder (1992) suggests Pliny’s attention to animals and breeding, and the Carthaginian naming of Africa as a place of little consequence, contributed to a distorted apocalyptic view of the continent. Over time, there has been a spillover to other southern contexts. Southern communities, however, hold plural views of their places in the world, ones that both recognize and resist dispositions of coloniality with standpoint metaphors, as in Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1963). In Decolonising the Mind, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (1986) enjoins a rejection of such distortions with ongoing watchful praxis to resist dispositions which hold them in place.

Recognizing the plurality and multidimensionality of the south reveals how expressions of southern epistemologies, ontologies, and cosmologies are embedded in southern multilingualisms worthy of study and contemplation in a sociolinguistics of the south.² The first seeds of conversations and collaboration to rethink sociolinguistics from a southern perspective drew upon the work of southern and northern scholars whose conceptual and methodological work in Africa, the Américas, and Asia-Pacific had inspired fresh perspectives on contemporary debates on the plurality of knowledges, and linguist...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Contributors
• 1 A Sociolinguistics of the South
• Part I Stories of the South and Their Storytellers
• Part II Southern Ways – Care, Hope, and Love
• Part III Sociolinguistic Methods of the South
• Index