Southernizing Sociolinguistics: Colonialism, Racism, and Patriarchy in Language in the Global South

This innovative collection offers a pan-Southern rejoinder to hegemonies of Northern sociolinguistics. It showcases voices from the Global South that substitute alternative and complementary narrations of the link between language and society for canonical renditions of the field.

Drawing on Southern epistemologies, the volume critically explores the entangled histories of racial colonialism, capitalism, and patriarchy in perpetuating prejudice in and around language as a means of encouraging the conceptualization of alternative epistemological futures for sociolinguistics. The book features work by both established and emerging scholars, and is organized around four parts: The politics of the constitution of language, and its metalanguage, in the Global South; Who gets published in sociolinguistics? Language in the Global South and the social inscription of difference; and Learning and the quotidian experience of language in the Global South.

This book will be of interest to scholars in sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, critical race and ethnic studies, and philosophy of knowledge.

Chapter 11 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license.

Bassey E. Antia is Professor of Applied Linguistics at the University of Western Cape, South Africa. His research interests span across multilingualism, terminology, language and health, the politics of language, and Southern epistemologies. A co-edited volume, Decolonial Voices, Language, and Race, appeared in 2022 (Multilingual Matters). Previous work has included a monograph and two co-edited volumes.

Sinfree Makoni is Professor of African Studies and Applied Linguistics at Pennsylvania State University. He has held a number of different positions in the United States and Southern Africa. He has published extensively in the areas of language in health, language policy and planning, and decolonial and Southern epistemologies. He is currently an associate editor of the Journal of Applied Linguistics and holds a number of honorary appointments in universities in Africa.