This book questions assumptions about the nature of language and how language is conceptualized. Looking at diverse contexts from sign languages in Indonesia to literacy practices in Brazil, from hip-hop in the US to education in Bosnia and Herzegovina, this book forcefully argues that a critique of common linguistic and metalinguistic suppositions is not only a conceptual but also a sociopolitical necessity. Just as many notions of language are highly suspect, so too are many related concepts premised on a notion of discrete languages, such as language rights, mother tongues, multilingualism, or code-switching. Definitions of language in language policies, education and assessment have material and often harmful consequences for people. Unless we actively engage with the history of invention of languages in order to radically change and reconstitute the ways in which languages are taught and conceptualized, language studies will not be able to improve the social welfare of language users.

About the Authors

Sinfree Makoni is Director of African Studies, Liberal Arts Professor of African Studies and Applied Linguistics, The Pennsylvania State University, USA.

Alastair Pennycook is Professor Emeritus at the University of Technology Sydney. His work has focused on language, colonialism and knowledge disparities, concerns highlighted in The Cultural Politics of English as an International Language (now a Routledge Linguistics Classic). Global Englishes and Transcultural Flows, Language and Mobility: Unexpected Places, and Posthumanist Applied Linguistics (all winners of the BAAL Book Prize). In Innovations and Challenges in Applied Linguistics from the Global South, (with Sinfree Makoni) – he has argued for the need for epistemological rethinking from the Global South. His most recent book – Language Assemblages (Cambridge University Press, 2024) – makes the case for a pluriversal and decolonial understanding of language and being.

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