From Southern Theory to Decolonizing Sociolinguistics

Voices, Questions and Alternatives

Ana Deumert, Sinfree Makoni, Sinfree Bullock Makoni

• Publisher: Multilingual Matters
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN:
  9781788926553
• eBook ISBN:
  9781788926584
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book, which combines scholarly articles with interviews, seeks to imagine a decolonized sociolinguistics. All the chapters are firmly grounded in southern approaches to knowledge production, focusing not only on epistemology but also on the complex relationship between epistemology and ontology. The chapters address issues ranging from author positionality to the central theorists of a southern sociolinguistics, and roam from the language classroom to the church, in ways which invite us to begin to decolonize ourselves and rethink normative assumptions about everything from academic writing to research methods and language teaching. The book provides scholars and teachers with inspiration for how to teach linguistics in ways that challenge colonial hegemonies and that allow one to 'do' sociolinguistics otherwise. It also makes a powerful argument that debates about decolonization, southern theory and social justice are not just academic pursuits: what is at stake is our future and how we imagine it.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contributors
• Preface
• 1 Introduction: From Southern Theory to Decolonizing Sociolinguistics
• 2 ‘Purifying’ Hindi Translanguaging from English and Urdu Emblems: A Sociolinguistic Decolonization of the Hindu Right?
• 3 The South in the North: Colonization and Decolonization of the Mind
• 4 Conversation with Ellen Cushman
• 5 From Douglas Firs to Giant Cuttlefish: Reimagining Language Learning
• 6 Making the Secular Sacred: Sociolinguistic Domains and Performance in Christian Worship
• 7 The Relevance of Experience: Decolonial and Southern Indigenous Perspectives of Language
• 8 From Anthropophagy to the Anthropocene: On the Challenges of Doing Research in Language and Society in Brazil and the Global South
• 9 Localizing National Multilingualism in Some Countries in East Africa
• 10 Conversation with Lynn Mario Menezes De Souza
• 11 Thoughts on ‘Love’ and Linguistic Citizenship in Decolonial (Socio)linguistics
• 12 ‘Sociolinguistics Maak My Skaam [Sociolinguistics Makes Me Ashamed]’: Humour as Decolonial Methodology
• 13 Decolonial Praxis and Pedagogy in Sociolinguistics: Concluding Reflections
• 14 Commentary:From Southern Theory to Decolonizing Sociolinguistics – A Radical Listening
• 15 Commentary: Mobile Gazing. On Ethical Viability and Epistemological Sustainability
• Index