A Sociolinguistics of the South (Routledge Critical Studies in Multilingualism)

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.

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.