Abstract
This article explores language ideologies and sociolinguistic scales from the perspective of decolonization. Coloniality is a multi-scalar world system that affects micro-level interactions in multiple locales, both in the metropole and in the former colonies. Not only does coloniality exist on a world scale, resistance to it is scaled up too and engulfs the world. The linguistic tradition that I seek to trace in this article is imaginative, creative and oriented towards alternative decolonial futures. It speaks to the experience of the coloniality of language, of language as alienating and oppressive, and to the corresponding desire, and need, for a different language. It articulates a decolonial philosophy and brings art and politics together to change the world. I show that the global south was, and is, an intellectual-artistic-political vanguard, articulating and shaping discourses about language and revolutionary action. In philosophical, artistic and political practice – stretching from Martinique to Paris, from Cape Town to Kingston – language and revolutionary practice merge into one: language no longer just reflects reality, it can change it.
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Language ideologies and social positioning: the restoration of a “much needed bridge”
- The dialectics of indexical semiosis: scaling up and out from the “actual” to the “virtual”
- Figures of personhood: time, space, and affect as heuristics for metapragmatic analysis
- (Meta-)communicative work in a counselling centre for refugees: reiteration, erasure and agency
- Insurgent words: challenging the coloniality of language
- Indexical borders: the sociolinguistic scales of the shibboleth
- Book Review
- Tim McNamara: Language and Subjectivity
- Varia
- Access and reach of linguistic repertoires in periods of change: a theoretical approach to sociolinguistic inequalities
- Chinese teenagers’ perceptions of vitality of Hokkien Chinese in Penang, Malaysia
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Language ideologies and social positioning: the restoration of a “much needed bridge”
- The dialectics of indexical semiosis: scaling up and out from the “actual” to the “virtual”
- Figures of personhood: time, space, and affect as heuristics for metapragmatic analysis
- (Meta-)communicative work in a counselling centre for refugees: reiteration, erasure and agency
- Insurgent words: challenging the coloniality of language
- Indexical borders: the sociolinguistic scales of the shibboleth
- Book Review
- Tim McNamara: Language and Subjectivity
- Varia
- Access and reach of linguistic repertoires in periods of change: a theoretical approach to sociolinguistic inequalities
- Chinese teenagers’ perceptions of vitality of Hokkien Chinese in Penang, Malaysia