Decoloniality and language scholarship – a critical intervention

1 Introduction

In the last decade, socially oriented language scholars in socio/applied linguistics have become increasingly aware of the colonial legacies of the discipline and how this has affected our theories, methodologies and ways of disseminating our research (Bock and Stroud 2021; Canagarajah 2022; Castañeda-Peña et al. 2024; Charity Hudley et al. 2024; De Fina et al. 2023; Deumert et al. 2020; Heller and McElhinny 2017; Heugh et al. 2021; Makoni et al. 2022; Mufwene 2020; Ndhlovu and Makalela 2021; Pennycook and Makoni 2020, among many others). Some of these works make reference to a “(de)colonial linguistics” as a needed paradigm shift in language studies. Nevertheless, it is not always clear what this implies. As Makoni states, decoloniality is still “a very contentious strategy because the term means different things to different people” (2019: 150).

The aim of this piece is to discuss the risks of the inflated appeal to decoloniality in the field and to develop some cautionary points for the debate, some of which have already been pointed out in recent works (De Fina et al. 2023; Menezes de Souza 2021; Pennycook 2023). However, despite such caution, we feel a sense of discomfort in how the use of decoloniality in applied/sociolinguistics has grown exponentially over the last few years. For instance, decoloniality is a term we associate with a radical history of material and political struggle in formerly colonized societies in the Global South. What we find surprising is the regular and sanitized manifestations of decoloniality in academic discourse, which seems distant from this history. We also feel a sense of disquiet about how the decolonial discourse appears to be concerned about epistemic questions at the expense of the material. As scholars from the South, but also participating in academic projects in the North, we would like to argue that the way decoloniality is invoked in applied/sociolinguistics runs the risk of becoming a buzzword that is sometimes deployed with inadequate attention to how its conceptual and political premises need to be critically contextualized. This increasing enthusiasm for a “decolonial linguistics” could be concealing key problems in the way we are producing knowledge, similar to what happened with the study of multilingualism (Duchêne 2020).

In this piece, we propose three challenges that, from our point of view, would need to be addressed in a more serious way in order to avoid the depoliticization of the discussions around language and (de)coloniality. These emerged from a feeling of discomfort on our part in relation to the way the discussion has been developing and from critical conversations with colleagues about the topic. We will explain these challenges with our own research experiences in Sri Lanka and Perú, but also based on our mobile academic trajectories. First, we will address the issue that decoloniality, by insisting on an incommensurable non-western alterity outside modernity, can end up reproducing inequalities. Second, we will argue that the way decoloniality is invoked in the field can reinforce a number of binaries, despite trying to undermine them. Finally, we will claim that decoloniality is sometimes discussed in a decontextualized manner and runs the risk of distancing itself from how it can impact on-the-ground situations in highly complex circumstances. These three challenges are deeply intertwined but will be differentiated to better illustrate our argument.

We hope that this piece will activate further fruitful discussions at a time when other critical applied/sociolinguists are also calling for caution about the current decolonial trend in our fields. We are conscious that we ourselves are complicit, at least to some extent, in the very process of knowledge production that is critiqued here. Therefore, rather than highlight the work of specific authors – which we feel undermines the critical spirit of our intervention – we have adopted an approach where we try to provide a more overall view of how decoloniality has impacted our field.

2 A depoliticized discourse of alterity

A key distinction that theorists of decoloniality make – between decoloniality and postcoloniality – is that while the latter acknowledges the imprint of coloniality on the present and seeks to work through its contradictions the former seeks a complete disavowal. Walter Mignolo, one of the scholars whose work defines the contemporary scholarly debate on decoloniality (and has greatly influenced socially-oriented language studies) argues for “epistemic reconstruction” or a complete break from colonial forms of knowing the world (Mignolo 2017). The Manichean orientation that underlies this epistemological (and ontological) position results in an imaginary that looks for an alterity that is untainted by modernity. While decoloniality as a specific academic and programmatic project is relatively recent, similar thinking has a fairly long history. Different iterations of attempting to define an epistemological and ontological position outside ‘modernity’ is visible in the work of a diverse range of scholars such as Ashis Nandy (1988, 1990, 1995), Syed Alatas (1974, 2014), Alatas and Vineeta (2017) or Talal Asad (1993, 2003). Though these are by no means homogenous positions, they share a common orientation of exploring the possibility of a non-modern and non-western alterity. We find it problematic to imagine such an alterity unmarked by modernity, which in turn can be shaped by romantic notions about indigenous peoples or societies that are not considered ‘fully modern’, not only because it does not correspond to contemporary practices in such contexts, but also because it essentializes, otherizes, and, consequently, depoliticizes them. As Rivera Cusicanqui – the well-known Bolivian feminist scholar-activist, who is a vocal critique of decoloniality – states for the case of Bolivia, this deprives indigenous people of their capacity to affect the state (2019), in the sense of denying them as political subjects.

From Latin America, there are currently important critical voices that engage with this depoliticized discourse of alterity, which has been co-opted by official discourses, an indigenous bourgeoisie and some sections of the academic world (Mujica 2019; Oviedo Freire 2024). Rivera Cusicanqui points out that imagining this alterity untainted by modernity “is alien to us as a tactic” (2019: 107): “The new stereotype of the indigenous combines the idea of a continuous territorial occupation, invariably rural, with a range of ethnic and cultural traits, and classifies indigenous behavior and constructs scenarios for an almost theatrical display of alterity” (2019: 110). For Rivera Cusicanqui, this essentialized type of alterity affirms and recognizes, but simultaneously excludes a large majority of indigenous people who live in the cities, the subtropics, the mining centers, and the indigenous commercial networks (including the black markets). As she puts it: “We indigenous were and are, above all, contemporary beings and peers, and in this dimension (aka pacha), we perform and display our own commitment to modernity” (2019: 107).

One can trace a similar disquiet in how a number of important thinkers in the decolonizing movement have critiqued such romanticization of the ‘indigenous’. For instance, the work of Frantz Fanon, the iconic Martiniquean psychiatrist and thinker, also illustrates the problematic consequences of a Manichean orientation. In the “Pitfalls of National Consciousness”, Fanon (1961) articulated the dangers of how anti-colonial movements can be seduced by the notion of a utopian pre-colonial past. In Fanon’s staging of decolonizing nationalism, he argues that the politically most destabilizing moment is when postcolonial societies develop a bourgeoisie who, unwilling or unable to grapple with the complexities of the present, retreat into a chimerical pre-colonial past. For Fanon, this past-orientedness is politically and conceptually debilitating. It is this critical orientation that led Fanon and the Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka to criticize Leopold Senghor’s and Aime Cessaire’s formulation of ‘negritude’ – or the belief in an essential black African identity – as a failed ontology as well as a failed political strategy (Tabensky 2016). One sees clear political manifestations of this kind of essentialist thinking within the contemporary majoritarian hindutva movement in India and also in Sinhala majoritarian ideology in Sri Lanka. In both cases, nationalists who subscribe to this ideology believe in an ahistorical and transcendent essence and are therefore resistant (sometimes violently so) to what they see as corruptions of this essence.

Rivera Cusicanqui’s discomfort with a romanticized notion of alterity in Latin America can also be productively related to similar critiques from locations such as South Asia, which also experienced colonial rule and are struggling with its aftermath. As the Pakistani scholar Amir Mufti (2000) has observed, many post-colonial cultures are characterized by a culture of ‘mourning’. This culture of loss and mourning is shaped by what subaltern studies historian Ranajit Guha identifies as a sense of colonial injury: “Whenever I read or hear the phrase colonial India, it hurts me. It hurts like an injury that has healed and yet has retained somehow a trace of the original pain” (Guha 1998: 87). This “pain” has been enormously productive both in a political and cultural sense. It is the perception of this “pain” that drove most anti-colonial movements to produce vast bodies of postcolonial artistic work and also postcolonial nation states to enact legislation that provided institutional recognition to local languages. However, this sense of mourning can also be politically weaponized for narrow indigenist agendas that have highly problematic outcomes. For instance, in current BJP-led India a proposal to rename the country bharat – changing its ‘colonial’ name India – is highly controversial because bharat signifies a Hindu-centric notion of India that excludes its millions of minorities, particularly Muslim Indians. However, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government presents this as a decolonizing move, which it technically is, but it is also a move that ironically expands the hegemony of Hindu India and in essence re-colonizes the non-Hindu minorities. Similarly, as Jaspal Singh has argued, Hindi language purism is also presented as a form of decolonization though in reality it operates on nativist majoritarian premises (Singh 2023: 18–38).

The problematic outcomes of uncritically valorizing decoloniality are also abundantly visible in many other domains. For instance, Walter Mignolo provided a glowing tribute to the book India that is Bharat (2021) by engineer-turned public intellectual, Sai Deepak, whose main thesis in the book is that India’s current social, political and economic challenges arise from a deeply-ingrained colonial mindset and therefore it is imperative to decolonize India at the level of epistemology. This seemingly benign and progressive proposition becomes much more insidious when one contextualizes Deepak’s work within the rise of culturally and politically exclusivist hindutva politics in India and his avowed sympathies for the Hindu cause (Harshana 2022: 4–6). In Sri Lanka, during the COVID 19 pandemic such indigenist thinking, politically manipulated and weaponized for a majoritarian nationalist cause, almost derailed the country’s excellent public health system and vaccination campaign through the promotion of a charlatan “indigenous healer” who claimed he had a miracle cure for COVID (Harshana 2022: 12–15). This “miracle cure” was promoted by two western-trained medical doctors along with a group of intellectuals and policymakers who subscribe to an indigenist ideology called jathika chintanaya (national thought). Originating in the late 1970s, this movement has championed a non-western epistemology and over the years attracted a significant number of fellow-travelers who now occupy influential positions in Sri Lankan public life. The movement associates its alternative epistemology with majority Sinhala and Buddhist culture. At the same time its proponents, western trained professionals and intellectuals who speak on behalf of indigeneity, undermine ‘actual’ indigenous agents such as those practicing traditional medicine or ayurveda (Harshana 2022).

In Latin America, and specifically within the Andean region, we find movements characterized by this culture of mourning, which retreats into an idyllic ancestral past and demonizes “western culture” appealing to a decolonizing move. Particularly in Perú, most people who promote this kind of ideology were socialized in Quechua in rural communities, but now live in urban contexts and work for the State or NGOs. They have been recently labeled as Pachamamistas by other indigenous activists and mostly youth, in the sense that they imagine the “Andean world” as ancestrally (and harmoniously) connected to the Pachamama (or sacred land) and detached from the “western world” and its social antagonisms: “They not only praise the Pachamama, but hate westerners and want to go back, back, back where supposedly there have been no social conflicts, no envy, no gender violence, nothing” (Quechua activist). This orientation has also had an impact on the official implementation of mother tongue education with indigenous languages as a “special” type of education for children in high altitude rural areas who supposedly own the ancestral Andean culture. This tendency freezes differences, creates rigid divisions between Western and Andean culture, and positions Quechua students within a static past with inherent biological and cultural characteristics; all of which end up racializing the beneficiaries of this educational policy and, consequently, debilitating those who are supposedly being empowered (Zavala 2024). As many scholars have discussed, the notion of culture, as a noun and in the singular (as in ‘Andean culture’), operates to enforce separations between self and other treated as essential givens, and inevitably carries a sense of hierarchy (Abu-Lughod 1991; Castro Gómez 2000). Despite decolonial aims, this can reproduce colonial relationships.

In Bolivia and Ecuador, the ‘Allin Kawsay’ and ‘Sumak Kawsay’ movements (loosely translated as ‘Good Living/Good Life’) originated at the turn of the century in a context of struggle for the defense of the ecological space of indigenous communities and against extractivist enterprises. Nevertheless, as it usually happens, grassroot categories are co-opted by powerful discourses and are now being used by the Bolivian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ecuadorian Political Constitution, but also by other narrow indigenist agendas from a rather conservative and depoliticized orientation. In Bolivia, for instance, the Ministry of Cultures, Decolonization and Depatriarchalization created in 2020 “is a bureaucratic entity that basically serves as a screen to say that they are doing decolonization” (Oviedo Freire 2024). All of this has led many southern activists to speak out about the “decoloniality of decoloniality” as the need to critique (and decolonize) current depoliticized and romanticized decolonial interventions, and a way to bring back the political economy to the Diálogo de saberes in order to transcend the epistemic dimension and address the struggles for egalitarian redistribution. This reveals the “internal colonialism” that Rivera Cusicanqui talks about and how coloniality is recursively displayed within indigenous/minority people’s themselves (Mujica 2019, 2021). Therefore, these Southern categories of ‘Allin Kawsay’ and ‘Sumak Kawsay’ are not only being co-opted by the State to disguise neoliberal and capitalist interests as ‘diversity’ but by ‘indigenous peoples’ themselves, who are also traversed by multiple power relationships and interests. We should ask ourselves what role we academics play in these complex dynamics when we appropriate these categories for our own work, since we could end up supporting decolonial interventions without taking into account the political complexities at stake.

The notion of ‘Good living/Good life’ in Bolivia and Ecuador can be usefully compared to the discourse of apekama (‘ourness’) in the Sri Lankan context. Sri Lanka has had a long-standing campaign for organic farming which attempted to wean farmers away from over-reliance on chemical fertilizers and chemical pesticides which are used heavily in commercial farming. However, during the past few years an indigenist lobby began appropriating this organic farming campaign to promote a romanticized notion of pre-colonial life. They attempted to popularize the idea that pre-colonial Sri Lankan life – characterized by a notion of apekama or an ‘authentic’ form of living – was an ecologically superior alternative to modern existence. While this in itself was a benign idea, and could have potentially helped popularize organic farming, things became more insidious when members of this group were able to influence public policy through political lobbying and convinced the president of the country to affect a disastrous overnight ban of chemical pesticides and fertilizers in May 2021. This sudden ban resulted in massive crop losses creating shortages and driving steep price hikes in many staples such as rice, and also adversely impacted Sri Lanka’s main export crops like tea. The sudden ban also undermined years of work by environmentalists who had been gradually introducing organic farming – not through romanticized notions of a pre-colonial “good life”, but by pragmatic appeals to health concerns and by convincing farmers of the economic benefits of going organic (Kadupitiyage 2021). The economic effects of this hasty policy change are still being felt in the country. The apekama discourse can also be traced to a group of western-educated intellectuals and the jathika chintanaya (or national thought) movement that was discussed earlier.

Having worked in indigenous contexts for a long time, we are well aware that the category of indigeneity is highly contested and that it is not a self-evident individually embodied identity. Moreover, ‘indigenous’ not only refers to indigenous ethnic communities (or tribes) as in Latin America, but to ‘traditional’ populations who think of themselves as less modern or less western (as happens in South Asia). Within this broadest sense of the term, and in their profound heterogeneity, indigenous peoples struggle from within modernity and its antagonisms, and also participate in relations of coloniality within complex power relationships. However, as scholar-activists such as Rivera Cusicanqui have argued, the choice to engage with or refuse so-called legacies of ‘modernity’ is not an easy or free choice. Some indigenous communities desire modernity – better educational access, possibility of social mobility, or better healthcare. In terms of language this situation is tremendously complex.

We are aware that decoloniality within the academe today cannot be seen as a straightforward process of past-orientedness or that the discourse on decoloniality and language does not essentialize language. Nevertheless, we do perceive problematic manifestations of constructing indigenous/minority people as having their own ways of experiencing language within local worldviews and also being genuinely willing to oppose modern ways of conceptualizing language. In fact, numerous authors have given an account of other ways of thinking about language, no longer atomistically and in isolation, but always in a mutable, relational, embodied and affective way (Deumert et al. 2020; Leonard 2017; Severo and Makoni 2023; among many others). Although we know well that modernity constructed language in a certain way and with the aim of exercising power, this does not mean that indigenous/minority views of language can be conceptualized outside of it. Since reality is always framed, the relationship of indigenous people with their languages is also mediated by a series of ideologies that come from “western thought”.

What language minorities do is navigate the forces of power within modernity in order to obtain social justice in terms of recognition, participation and socioeconomic distribution. Therefore, rather than imagining the act of decolonization as the search for a radical alterity untainted by modernity, it is more useful to investigate decolonization as a phenomenon where people encounter, interpret and recruit ideas and concepts that have traveled due to modernity and their local adoption and adaptation – similar to the kind of epistemological orientation Dipesh Chakrabarty outlines in Provincializing Europe (2000). As researchers, we should address how people negotiate these challenges and with what consequences.

3 The production of new binaries

Critical applied/sociolinguists have been discussing for a while how our language of description relies on multiple problematic binaries, which hinders how we address the nuanced complexity of language in society. Many of these long-standing dichotomies have long since been overcome – such as language/society, material/discourse, orality/literacy, mind/body or first/second language. Nevertheless, there are other ones like micro/macro, human/non-human, people/place, linguist/speaker, academic/nonacademic language and whiteness/non-whiteness that have only been problematized more recently. In the last two decades, scholars have proposed an ontological move “from binaries and dichotomies to a more complex terrain of multiplicity, heterogeneity, convergence and flows” (Pietikäinen 2016: 237). Notions such as rhizomatic dynamics (Deleuze and Guattari 1987), assemblages (Pietikäinen 2021, 2024), intersectionalities (Levon 2015), entanglements (Kerfoot and Hyltenstam 2017), hypercultural processes (Han 2022) and ch’ixi (Rivera Cusicanqui 2019) account for complexity in language dynamics, although other scholars had already been discussing this for a longer time (see the notion of ‘nexus’ from Scollon and Scollon 2004, or the one of ‘bivalency’ and ‘simultaneity’ from Woolard 2008). Research on language and decoloniality seeks to traverse binaries and boundaries (De Fina et al. 2023; García et al. 2021; Kramsch et al. 2024; among others), but can create binaries of its own making. The decolonial call to go beyond ‘abyssal thinking’ (Santos 2014) runs the risk of producing new problematic binaries, such as indigenous versus western thought, Global South versus Global North or even colonial versus decolonial; although these are not the only binarisms that can occur.

While decoloniality rejects the hierarchical assumptions underlying this binary colonial view and sees the “non-West” or “non-modern” not as inferior but offering an alternative epistemology and ontology, it can nevertheless replicate the colonial worldview of a binary world. This is what Partha Chatterjee (1993) has called the “thematic and the problematic” of anti-colonial nationalism. At the conceptual (thematic) level anti-colonial thinkers accept the East-West binary. The challenge or the ‘problematic’ becomes how to invert or change the hierarchy of this relationship. Seemingly, decoloniality moves beyond the ‘thematic’ by imagining the possibility of a radical alterity. However, in reality, decolonial thinking also, often, remains prisoner to an East-West binary, which gets reinforced by a non-western alterity conceivable through an ahistorical imagination of a world where certain cultures or social realities have remained isolated and static and somehow immune to cultural contact and historical change. The work of scholars like Talal Asad, for instance, has been critiqued for suggesting such a possibility through the notion of ‘discrepant experience’ (Asad 1993). In his critique of secularism, Asad appears to suggest that Islamic societies have remained ‘static’ in comparison to their western counterparts and this move in turn results in a homogenizing notion of an ahistorical ‘Islamic’ world posited against an equally ahistorical and monolithic ‘western’ world (Bangstad 2009; Pecora 2006: 25–42).

Being too critical of western thought/scientific thinking could lead to imagining a non-western thought, as if it were uncontaminated by modernity and essentially different. The danger with this is that this non-western thought can become the exoticized and even racialized Other. This is what happens in many experiences of mother tongue education with indigenous languages in Latin America, which end up “Othering” and racializing its beneficiaries despite intending the opposite (Zavala 2024). Pennycook refers to this problematic quite clearly in a recent publication: “There is a danger generally as we seek alternative ways of thinking from a Southern perspective that in a rush to reject mind-body dualism or forms of rational and scientific thinking, we end up projecting a world of bodies and emotions onto Southern epistemologies, a project that can start to look uncomfortably like a perpetuation of the colonial distinction between the rational European mind and its bodily others” (2023: 79).

The kind of self-orientalization Pennycook (2023) identifies is also deeply tied to politics in postcolonial societies, which are often shaped by a discourse of authenticity-inauthenticity. As Mufti’s (2000) work has shown, the desire for an alterity untainted by modernity derives from a discourse of authenticity-inauthenticity that attends to decolonial thinking. In many postcolonial societies contemporary politics is haunted by a sense of inauthenticity of the present – authentic selfhood lies somewhere between colonial contact and the perceived ruptures it created in an organic way of life. This imaginary has had tremendous political appeal, as Walter Benjamin has shown in “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”: even the genocidal intent of National Socialism was informed by notions of authenticity. It is also important to note the intimate links between Nazi notions of authenticity and racial ideology and language (Hutton 1999), which in turn infiltrated nationalist movements in the Global South in places like India and Sri Lanka where local racial ideologies converged with racio-linguistic ideologies about arya genealogy transported by European philology. Perhaps the greater irony that is often missed but is evident when one looks critically at indigenist movements is that the search for ‘non-modern’ alternatives is the product of modernity itself. As David Harvey (1993) reminds us, “the problem of authenticity is itself peculiarly modern”. It emerges partly as a reaction to the experience of being alienated from various aspects of life (modes of production, rural to urban migration, cultural displacement, etc.) and it is amplified in postcolonial societies because ‘modernity’ (whatever that may be) is perceived as arriving through external colonial influence.

Critical sociolinguistics has already questioned an unexamined notion of authenticity within a nostalgic sociolinguistics and addresses language ideologies of authenticity opting for the notion of authentication as the outcome of constantly negotiated practices (Bucholtz 2003; Coupland 2014). The notions of ‘nativeness’ in applied linguistics or ‘vernacular language’ from the initial work of Labov problematically grappled with issues of authenticity and at times reproduced the authentic/inauthentic binary. Despite this history of critical engagement with authenticity, the allure of decolonization in contexts where decolonial discourses are mobilized to assuage ‘colonial guilt’ is such that authenticity can be used in uncritical ways. After all, probing notions of authenticity in southern contexts could appear politically incorrect. Such reluctance to question notions of authenticity can lead to a situation where the idea of the Global South or indigenous thought (within binaries such as Global South/Global North or indigenous thought/western thought) could be colored by a romanticized idea of the authentic. In contrast, scholars in the Global South have often questioned how ideas of an ‘authentic’ ‘indigeneity’ are deployed for political gain and can reproduce inequalities in their societies.

The critique of the ‘coloniality of decoloniality’ within the South mentioned above shows levels of recursive power relationships within indigenous/minoritized peoples themselves. Since they are traversed by multiple vectors of power, the strict dichotomy between indigenous and non-indigenous does not make much sense where we work, although we are aware of an indigeneity that have been useful for mobilization, legislation and qualifying for rights. The indigenist stereotypes of the “noble savage” and the “guardian of nature” erase the internal dynamics of the subalterns and the ‘internal coloniality’, as Rivera Cusicanqui puts it (2019). It erases the complex messiness of what happens on the ground. We have recurrently witnessed this messiness in our own research in Sri Lanka and Perú, as when indigenous activists appeal to ancestral knowledge for political gain or exercise power over their peers based on class and gender; or when local languages confront the hegemony of colonial legacies by struggling to enter domains of ‘modernity’ historically dominated by colonial languages like English. For instance, if one takes indigenous language activism during the early twentieth century in Sri Lanka, binary categories like modern versus non-modern make little sense because anti-colonial activism was simultaneously modern and non-modern. This is well illustrated in the hela havula movement which attempted to “purify” the Sinhala language through de-Sanskritization and by arguing for an autochthonous model of language origin as opposed to the Indian-centric allochthonous model dominant at the time (Coperahewa 2011). While at one level the movement looks past-oriented and resistant to modernity (rejecting Sanskrit and other influences on the Sinhala language based on a notion of a pure past), it also had a distinct ‘modernizing’ dynamic because the movement’s charismatic founder, Munidasa Cumaratunga, developed grammars, wrote language instruction books and helped codify and systematize the language. Cumaratunga, who was an Anglo-Vernacular schools inspector and therefore intimately familiar with colonial language ideology, was, in effect, attempting to make Sinhala ‘coeval’ – to use a term theorized by Johannes Fabian (2014 [1983]) – with ‘modern’ languages like English.

Scholarship on translanguaging in relation to decoloniality also produces a binary between a pristine and utopian but ‘pre-social’ world where translanguaging is the norm, and a ‘social’ world where such language practices are resisted. Some variants of translanguaging scholarship, for instance, seek to undo modernist legacies by implicitly basing this move on a reality that existed prior to colonization – as if the precolonial were always somehow utopian and liberating (Canagarajah and Liyanage 2024). While we agree with the epistemological and ontological premise of conceiving languages from a process-oriented perspective (and taking this into account in multilingual pedagogies), we consider this romanticized notion of a pre-colonial past with translanguaging to be problematic.

Language, codification and the reproduction of social and political hierarchies through language is not necessarily a post-enlightenment or ‘modern’ phenomenon, as the work of scholars like Pollock (1993), Ramaswamy (1993) and Freeman (1998) in relation to classical languages such as Sanskrit, Tamil and Kannada show. Extending partially from this historical perspective is also a view commonly held in translanguaging scholarship that translanguaging is something that we instinctively and ‘naturally’ do but is impeded by our socialization into codified ways of thinking about language (Garcia and Otheguy 2019). These ideas also dovetail into the nature-culture binary we identified in decolonizing scholarship in the previous section, which in turn leads to a kind of paternalistic orientation towards ‘indigenous’ communities who are thought to inhabit such a pre-social mentality. Like all language practices, translingual practices are always charged with social meanings and cannot be conceptualized outside of ideology.

In sum, our argument in this section is that for decoloniality to be meaningful to on the ground struggles, coming to terms with the ‘messiness’ we have outlined above is critical. Therefore, it would be politically and conceptually more fruitful to perceive the struggles of postcolonial societies as an ‘agonistic’ encounter where any number of binaries such as West-East, modern-non modern, civility-incivility or non-indigenous-indigenous exist in a dialectical and even potentially conflictual relationship rather than as well-defined oppositions. We also believe that no knowledge is inherently good or bad or that some knowledge is naturally more emancipatory while others are repressive. We observe that many decolonial binaries are informed by such a good-versus-bad typology. A more dialectical approach, in this context, could lead to sounder, powerful and politically more important knowledge. We further extend these ideas in our last section.

4 A decontextualized decoloniality

One last point that we would like to present here regards how research on language and decoloniality sometimes make claims that are detached from on-the-ground situations in highly complex circumstances. We don’t think that coloniality (or decoloniality) constitutes a category with a decontextualized meaning. It is not a static concept subjected to a closed and final definition. The same has been discussed in relation to race and racism (Goldberg 2009; Wetherell and Potter 1992). Instead of assuming racism as an ideology with a fixed system of ideas and an a priori content, it is better to approach it as an ideological practice that functions differently depending on the context. The emphasis on ideological practice assumes racism as a series of ideological effects with flexible, fluid, and varied content. What is important is the effect and not so much the content, as the latter will always be changing and reinventing itself within new social dynamics where the power of race is challenged (Zavala 2020). Although we need categories as researchers, we believe that colonial practices are constantly reinventing themselves and being recursively enacted in complex structures of power relations (Reyes 2017). After all, we can’t forget that coloniality originated in processes of racialization, which attempted to justify the economic exploitation of the colonized population.

From the perspective of sociolinguistics, coloniality in language has been defined as turning language into a reduced code out of the flexible repertoires of speakers – deriving from a European concept of language, centered on ideas of grammar, dictionaries and literacy (Deumert et al. 2020; Severo and Makoni 2023). In applied linguistics, scholars have discussed the principles of multilingual pedagogical practices capable of disrupting the coloniality of schooling (Phyak et al. 2024). Translanguaging has also been posited as a ‘decolonial project’ and a counter-conduct that embraces the students as multilingual beings and transforms the power relationships between the named languages in society (Li Wei and García 2022). Nevertheless, the way these moves to challenge the coloniality of language are presented, can not only reproduce the colonial/decolonial dichotomy, but also produce an approach to coloniality with apriori assumptions about the relationship between language and power. Following others (Heller and McElhinny 2017), we argue that coloniality and decoloniality can acquire different meanings depending on the geopolitical context, and colonial logics can also be used for decolonial interventions. In fact, some notions may look liberatory, but can end up being repressive under specific socio historical circumstances (like translanguaging), while others may look repressive (like Quechua standardization), but can be used for political purposes that seek to empower vulnerable groups, also in specific circumstances. All language resources are multi-valent (as Woolard’s point on bivalency reminds us) and, hence, can be used for decolonial as well as colonial ends, depending on context.

Working in decolonial contexts or with indigenous/minority communities has taught us that the lexicon of modernity is deeply entrenched within social structures and that it can also be empowering. The fact that modern notions can be emancipatory for various communities in certain contexts has already been acknowledged by critical socio/applied linguistic scholars (Bonnin and Unamuno 2021; Cenoz and Gorter 2017; Madsen 2023; May 2022, among others). In fact, concepts like mother tongue, speech community, minority language rights, native speaker, etc. – all categories open to the critique that they are essentialist – have been historically emancipatory for various communities across the world. The same happens with the development and promotion of grammars, dictionaries, literacy and language standardization, which indigenous people sometimes appropriate for their ends and in very complex ways. Similar to phenomena like nation and nationalism, the ontological deconstruction of language is fairly easy. However, their impact as a ‘category of practice’ (Brubaker 2004) cannot be so easily discounted. A nation-state or a named language may be a fiction but, like many other human phenomena, they are also powerful and deeply embedded social fictions.

If one looks critically at contemporary language politics in Sri Lanka – seemingly progressive initiatives like the promotion of bilingual education and the use of translanguaging to teach English – can be seen as insidious manifestations where neo-liberal discourses are converging with the re-colonization of the local language ecology. Sinhala – the language of the numerical majority of the country – has enjoyed a privileged status since independence in 1948. In 1956 Sinhala was made the sole official language through a controversial piece of legislation which marginalized Tamil, the language of two of the largest numerical minority communities in the country. This controversial decision is also often considered one of the main catalysts for Sri Lanka’s tragic ethno-nationalist history of conflict (De Votta 2004). Seen from this perspective, the Sinhala language and monolingual state language policies – which one could argue are practices that the postcolonial state inherited from the colonial state – are oppressive legacies that need to be undone. However, this is only a partial view of a complex story of decolonization. Throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth century the Sinhala language underwent a process of ‘modernization’ (Dharmadasa 1992), a process whereby the institutionalization of Sinhala helped displace the dominance of English in public, social and institutional life. Therefore, while elevating Sinhala at the expense of Tamil was socially and politically unjust, the elevation of Sinhala in relation to English was a progressive move that supported social justice.

Undermining this history of linguistic activism, today – due to neo-liberal market forces and the contraction of the welfare state – English is being promoted at the expense of both Sinhala and Tamil. Ironically, bilingual education policy in Sri Lanka is defined as English plus mother tongue (Sinhala or Tamil) (Perera and Kularatne 2014) and in a further twist English is being promoted as a ‘link’ language (Mendis and Rambukwella 2010) because of a naive assumption that it is a ‘neutral’ code, given the conflictual ethno-nationalist history between the Sinhala and Tamil communities. Attempting to position English as a language that can bridge ethno-nationalist divisions, however, represents a strange situation because it ignores how English as a language of colonization is deeply implicated in structures of class privilege and power (Tupas 2024). The irony of this situation is further compounded when translanguaging is thrown into the mix to argue that English can be ‘localized’ through a translingual approach. While the kind of mixed or meshed code envisaged in translanguaging may indeed popularize English, it is resisted by local language activists because such ‘code-meshing’ can represent an existential threat to local languages, which are not well-established, codified and institutionalized as English. However, seen from a metropolitan perspective such resistance by local language activists seems protectionist and ignorant of their own supposed ‘plurilingual’ history (Canagarajah 2005; Rajapakse 2023). The irony is that this encounter between metropolitan scholarship and local language activism replicates the power structures of how colonial scholarship encountered local knowledge, where local agents were undermined as not knowing their own past. In its contemporary iteration metropolitan scholarship has to help local agents ‘unlearn’ their modernist thinking and rediscover their authentic past.

In Perú, for example, mother tongue education or ‘intercultural bilingual education’ with indigenous languages is undergoing an increasing depoliticization, which includes a pachamamista discourse that places the beneficiary students in an alterity outside modernity from a romanticizing perspective. Many indigenous peoples with education credentials are part of this and are benefitting from how – in the last two decades – Quechua has turned into an economic resource that can be exchanged for other symbolic or material capital (Zavala 2020). Their Quechua knowledge and their “authentic” identity is used to gain status and earn money in various scenarios, including governmental ones. In the last decade, a grassroots movement in relation to Quechua is trying to question the pachamamista discourse and advocates for a more social justice perspective that transcends dichotomies and the idealization of the indigenous. This includes an increasing editorial movement with the firm mission of publishing in Quechua without translation to Spanish and constructing a formal register that generates an autonomy between Quechua and Spanish in order to “rescue the dignity” of a historically constructed “impoverished” and “ruralized” language. This also entails overcoming what people term quechuañol to refer to the mix between Spanish and Quechua (Zavala in press). Although quechuañol may be many people’s way of languaging, it is not conceptualized as “ours” due to language ideologies, which interfere with the transformative potential of translanguaging. In this case, a process of rhematization makes the mixing of Spanish and Quechua stand for the historical violence exerted by Spanish on the indigenous language, as an icon of a colonial injury: “we have lost our autonomy, the mixed coexistence of the languages shows a bad coexistence that naturalizes violence” (Quechua activist).

We believe in the importance of critically engaging with the language ideologies that undergird opposing translanguaging or appropriating colonial strategies for decolonial ends. In the above case, and despite obvious normative assumptions about language (which could generate exclusions), Quechua activists want to appropriate the language of modernity for emancipatory aims in order to neutralize the hierarchies between Quechua and Spanish and to cease being part of a compensatory discourse of the State. Therefore, it is not a matter of decolonizing minds with an a priori idea of what decolonizing language means, since what is really at stake is the material source of the value that is attributed to language resources (Heller and McElhinny 2022). Hence, the argument should not be about the origins of knowledge and who owns it, but which knowledge is empowering and emancipatory to whom, under which conditions, in which particular moment and why in terms of the political economy at stake in a context with deep colonial legacies. After all, modernity has no single provenance or shape, since its meaning and relevance has been negotiated by each society.

We consider that a decontextualized decoloniality leads to research that can become normative, in the sense of assuming that the colonial and decolonial have an a priori meaning and are universally applicable. This has also been pointed out in the latest discussions on language and social justice (Rosa and Flores 2021). In order to approach the phenomenon of language and decoloniality mitigating this risk, we would need to take a sufficiently nuanced sense of history into consideration, gather emic information from our participants through ethnographic research and understand the power relationships at stake within situated practices. In addition, the danger of working within a normative decoloniality lies in how it can reproduce knowledge production hierarchies despite decoloniality’s claims to being a southern theory. Menezes de Souza argues that some ‘decolonial strategies’ do not interrogate the coloniality present in them: “many still seem to speak in universal terms, unaware of how their locus of enunciation, located epistemically within the hegemonic North, may impact positively or negatively on the knowledge they produce and the knowledges of those of whose existence they are unaware” (2021: xx). What sometimes happens with theory-making, and what we see currently happening with decoloniality, is that theorizing decoloniality within academia is becoming an epistemological battleground where first world concerns shape the conversation rather than the concerns of on the ground struggles. We believe that a discourse like decoloniality – with its explicit political and activist legacy – should develop a constant vigilance about how it becomes institutionalized.

5 Final thoughts: decolonizing for who, what and where?

What drove us to write this essay – though we are located in very different contexts – was a sense of shared frustration. Over the last few years, we have seen a veritable explosion in the use of the term ‘decolonization’. Suddenly, it seemed that everything ranging from language, pedagogy and politics to architecture was being decolonized. Some of this disquiet about decoloniality has been already articulated by language scholars. But we felt it was important to make a sustained critique and also to critically interrogate why it was being so readily adopted and adapted. It was strange to suddenly see a term like decolonization – which we associated with a radical history of political and material struggle – regularly appearing in ‘first world’ conversations when we would have logically expected decoloniality to generate resistance rather than ready acceptance. It also seemed ironic to us that, while decolonization was being ritualistically invoked, the actual power structures and institutional practices in many of the places such conversations were taking place seem to remain largely unaltered.

Needless to say, our call is not to give up the term and its associated discussions, but to be more critically conscious about the sanitized manifestations of decoloniality in our field and do justice to a history of material and political colonial struggle. Decoloniality in language scholarship, as we see it, would mean an intellectual and political orientation that recognizes and resists the temptation to imagine a social world that is untainted by colonial influences, since the epistemologies we work with and the social realities that we seek to understand are saturated with the effects of the colonial encounter. Therefore, the way forward for critical applied/sociolinguistics would be not to abandon or denounce existing concepts and frameworks which are seen as tainted by coloniality or modernity, but to see how they operate in specific contexts and to develop a decolonial praxis that can be empowering for struggles relating to social and linguistic justice.

It is important to acknowledge that decoloniality is not the first buzzword in socio/applied linguistics. For instance, scholars have discussed ‘multilingualism’ (Duchêne 2020), ‘superdiversity’ (Pavlenko 2018), and translanguaging (Auer 2022; Bhatt and Bolonyai 2022; Jaspers 2018; MacSwan 2022). Moreover, this could be framed within a wider trend of ‘sloganization’ in academic discourse, through which academics follow fashionable intellectual movements to remain ‘productive’ under the increasing pressures of global and neoliberal academic infrastructures (Schmenk et al. 2018). We believe that decoloniality can also offer self-deluding comfort that one is engaging in a politics of emancipation yet all that is taking place is a form of withdrawal from the messiness of contemporary politics. We feel that decolonization has become so appealing precisely because it offers a means by which legacies of historical guilt – shaped by centuries of violent and inequitable contact – between the North and South can be sublimated and erased. We live in a world where economic inequality is widening at an alarming rate and happening at different scales – national, regional and global. We also live in a world where human migration on an unprecedented scale is resulting in people coming into contact under enormously inequitable conditions. The problem with decolonization – as it is being mainstreamed in academic and public discourse now – is that it offers an easy compromise to these inequalities.

As Tuck and Yang (2012) have forcefully articulated, “decolonization is not a metaphor”. For decolonization to actually matter it cannot be primarily about an epistemic struggle but about material issues such as race and economics, as many critical sociolinguists have been pointing out for decades. This is why, for instance, a translingual pedagogy in the classroom, a multilingual mindset, or the celebration of multilingual and multicultural identities within an educational environment cannot be read as automatically radical and transformative. While they may offer micro instances of social emancipation, they do little to alter material conditions. However, seen from a purely epistemic perspective, such micro instances can be attributed a disproportionate importance as examples of deconstructing western or modern paradigms of thought.

On the flip side of this process is how decolonization can be appropriated in Southern contexts to promote racist, classist and other kinds of exclusionary discourses under the guise of a return to indigeneity, trapping indigenous populations in romanticized and essentialist imaginaries. This important dimension of the appropriation of decoloniality is not usually perceived from the global north, due to its condescending and monolithic view of what happens in the south. Though there are important dissenting and critical voices, decolonization can still be apprehended naively in the Global South.

Therefore, while the Northern and Southern manifestations of decoloniality may appear distinct they are interconnected. The Northern appropriation of decoloniality – in an uneven global knowledge production economy – depoliticizes the discourse in at least two ways. At one level it allows for the comforting illusion that progressive change is being achieved in Northern societies where micro changes leave larger institutional structures intact. At another level this depoliticized decoloniality when re-exported to the Global South is instrumentalized to romanticize indigeneity/minoritized populations and exploit this for insidious political purposes.

As we have attempted to argue through our discussion of three intersecting challenges – the insistence on an incommensurable non-western alterity, the production of new binaries, and the decontextualization of decoloniality – a decolonial praxis needs to move beyond epistemic critique. One can always argue that scholarly debate is a space where intellectual debate needs to take place without a compulsion to intervene in the real world. Nonetheless, if we are also serious about the claim that knowledge is power and that epistemic critique therefore is a valid form of political engagement, we have to be keenly attuned to the fact that decoloniality is not a normative project with an already given form and content but that the who, the what and where of decoloniality is a critical question that needs to be insistently and repeatedly addressed.