Decoloniality and language scholarship: advancing the conversation

Although it is difficult to write this piece without Harshana, I will try to briefly respond to the insightful and thoughtful comments that our work has generated. I agree that our paper contains conceptual elements that would require further discussion or even reveals important absences such as the recognition of gender (see the comment from Córdova-Hernández & López Gopar from Mexico). Nevertheless, I hope that it can promote richer debates around the “explosion” of decoloniality in our disciplines and the need to move forward towards an applied/sociolinguistics with a more critical and contextual depth regarding colonial issues. I do think a decolonial/counter colonial/anti colonial (or whichever term one prefers) thinking and praxis, together with other critical frameworks, could help us better understand the role of language in the production of social inequality. At the same time, I contend that the ongoing colonial legacy of sociolinguistics, reinforced by neoliberalism, demands a more politicized and contextualized view of (de)coloniality that is linked to its historical and material roots – especially in a world where neoliberalism, in its various forms but in an intense state of predation, strategically rearticulates signifiers such as social transformation, social justice, or even decoloniality for non-democratic ends.

As might be expected, the examples we used to support our discussion were drawn from our home countries and our fieldwork in those specific contexts. In addition, our critique was indeed more focused on the Global South “rather than the structures and systems that have created the need to theorize decoloniality in the first place” (see R’boul & Barnawi’s comment). After all, la cabeza piensa donde los pies pisan (‘the head thinks from where the feet are planted’), as Paulo Freire circulated in the context of popular education. Nevertheless, what the four responses to our paper collectively reveal is that the depoliticization and romanticization of decolonial thought in academia concern scholars from many regions with different colonial and postcolonial histories – and even from other disciplines, such as cultural and religious studies. Harshana himself had been trained in literary criticism and cultural studies, rather than in sociolinguistics, as I was.

Furthermore, the comments ratify that what we questioned in the paper transcends particular works or authors, which is why we decided not to directly confront our ideas with specific sources. We ourselves felt complicit in the process of reifying decoloniality in the very way our paper sought to critique, and we wanted to highlight the issue as a salient concern. As our colleagues from the Philippines put it, “decolonial work compels us to grapple with difficult and often uncomfortable questions about ourselves and our complicities in the very systems we critique and seek to dismantle” (see Salonga et al.’s comment).

The authors of the four responses share our discomfort with normative modes of decolonial work and agree on the need to approach (de)coloniality from a perspective of critical contextualization. They also highlight multiple forms of internal “non-Western” colonialism appropriated by elite and ethnonationalist movements within the Global South. They illustrate that there is no single colonizer, and that the binaries of West–non-West/Global North–Global South/white–non-white, among others, risk obscuring the complex and nuanced realities of local contexts. As Chieng et al.’s comment points out, colonialism is not only the dark side of Western modernity (in Mignolo’s terms), but also “of non-Western, postcolonial modernity as well.” Additionally, the authors argue that these complexities and internal hierarchies within the Global South have often been ignored by scholars based in the North. They provide examples from Hong Kong, Taiwan, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Mexico, among other contexts, which complement what we discussed regarding Peru and Sri Lanka. Rather than romanticizing the alterity of minority voices as homogeneous entities, they argue that we should ask on whose behalf a minority speaks and from what positionality they represent their perspectives (see Chieng et al.’s comment).

The complexities and nuanced ways in which minoritized populations in the South negotiate with colonial regimes – and even recursively produce new dynamics based on colonial and capitalist logics – should contribute to expanding the field of “decolonial language studies” and to developing theories that counteract global knowledge hierarchies. Moreover, as the scholars from the Philippines (Salonga et al.) state, longstanding practices not necessarily labeled “decolonial” have sought to resist colonial legacies in our contexts, producing cracks and fissures to the enduring colonial order. These “unnamed decolonialities,” as they call them, raise the question of what decolonial work looks like on the ground even when it does not identify itself as such. Scholars from Hong Kong also discuss race as meaning-making processes that emerge from specific contexts, neither in the abstract nor from a predefining notion.

Our caution against binaries does not invalidate their utility in political mobilization, where essentialism may be strategically deployed to claim visibility and resources. We are not dismissing binaries as inherently colonial or romanticized, as R’boul & Barnawi suggest in their comment. Two dimensions need to be distinguished here. One is the pragmatic reality of (decolonial) practice, where the use of binaries operates within contextualized dynamics of power that researchers must disentangle. The other is researchers’ projection of alterity, which overlooks on-the-ground realities and conceals antagonisms within the framework of that alterity. In fact, when generating interpretations of the colonial/decolonial, we should try to understand how constructed binaries emerge, how they are fixed, and whose interests are served (Zavala et al. 2025). For instance, although critical applied/sociolinguists have deconstructed the notion of language through the process of disinvention (Pennycook & Makoni 2020), we must ask what the consequences are for progressive projects such as mother-tongue or intercultural bilingual education in former colonies, among other policies and interventions (Highet et al. 2024: 387).

In addition to clarifying our stance on binaries, I would like to underscore the intertwining of epistemic and material struggles, and the need “to unpack their mutual constitution” (see R’boul & Barnawi’s comment). While acknowledging this, our call was for decolonial language studies to move beyond epistemological critique, because we are concerned that material struggles may otherwise be entirely replaced by epistemic questions. Referring to “Indigenous thinking” as a monolithic category, or contrasting “Northern epistemologies” with “Southern epistemologies” in such general terms, does not always allow us to engage with how minoritized populations negotiate modernity within specific material conditions and interests, under the current pressures and dynamics of capitalism that permeate most of the postcolonial world.

As mentioned above, critiques of decolonial/postcolonial thought in academia – particularly regarding the emphasis on an incommensurable non-Western alterity – extend beyond the field of language studies. For instance, within sociology, Chibber argues that postcolonial theory (particularly the Subaltern Studies version) seeks to break with Eurocentrism, but ends up essentializing the cultures of the Global South and attributing radical differences to them in relation to the West, neglecting universal categories such as class, capitalism, and exploitation. In his words, “in the name of anti-Eurocentrism, postcolonial theory has resurrected the very cultural essentialism that progressives viewed – rightly – as the ideological justification for imperial domination” (2014: 77). He claims that “an obsession with cultural particularities” results in an exoticism once condemned by leftist movements in colonial depictions of the non-West.

As Chieng et al. argue, “giving salience to ‘local’ knowledges is most probably not enough for decolonial work, but problematic.” For them, this is closer to “dewesternization” than to the “decolonial,” which would require grappling with “both epistemic and material messiness in our respective contexts.” The authors from Mexico also raise relevant questions, aligned with our argument: “Do Indigenous peoples genuinely oppose modernity? Do Indigenous peoples experience their language only through local worldviews?” After all, resistance is never entirely pure, nor fully external to structures of power (and the enduring dynamics of capitalism). It functions only through the very elements established by power itself, and while it may subvert them, it can simultaneously reproduce them. The critical study of language precisely conceptualizes language and society as empirical phenomena that require rigorous investigation, rather than reducing them to abstract generalizations (Del Percio and Flubacher 2024: 5).

I would like to close this response with Salonga et al.’s idea of “wariness” as a disposition for making sense of the present “decolonial moment” we are going through. They suggest approaching the label “decolonial” with caution: “not to dismiss it, but to probe what gets included, what gets excluded, and what this reveals about the politics and pitfalls of naming.” Such a disposition can make us more attentive to how we engage with knowledge, how our modes of knowledge production may normalize power relations, and what effects standardizing forces have on the critical study of language in society.