Following a succinct introduction, this volume is divided into five parts. Part 1 addresses the ideological construction of language and its metalanguage in the Global South. In chapter 1, Christopher Hutton illustrates the inherent contradiction between generalized, core sociolinguistic concepts and the localized, socially constituted nature of language. Arthur K. Spears in chapter 2 demonstrates how his own researcher identity as an AAE speaker made decolonizing research possible. In chapter 3, Ajit K. Mohanty reviews scholarship on multilingual child socialization and argues for language-policy-centering multilingual practices and skills. Lunn Mario T. Menezes de Souza & Gabriel Nascimento in chapter 4 reveal the profoundly dehumanizing effects that occur when knowledge production is understood as disembodied and universal. In chapter 5, Unyierie Idem & Imelda Udoh show that colonial missionary projects directly impact local worldviews through specific language practices. Cristine Severo & Ashraf Abdelhay in chapter 6 examine how Christianity and Islam have reinforced and subverted modern conceptualizations of language.
Part 2 discusses the question of who gets published in linguistics. Busi Makoni in chapter 7 details African involvement in published sociolinguistics to reveal how networks of expertise are institutionalized. In chapter 8, Evershed Kwasi Amuzu, Elvis ResCue, Bernard Boakye, & Nana Aba Appiah Amfo argue that the pervasive foregrounding of white perspectives and the invisibility of black African women in sociolinguistics betray a failure to decenter coloniality.
Part 3 discusses how social difference in the Global South is inscribed with and through language. Bongi Bangeni, Nwabisa Bangeni, & Stephanie Rudwick in chapter 9 show ‘authentic Africanness’ in South Africa as discursively constituted through raciolinguistic judgements of belonging. In chapter 10, Uradyn Bulag critically examines the Mandarin-as-national-language political project and calls for a historical approach centering the experiences of minoritized groups. Rafael Lomeu Gomes & Bente A. Svendsen in chapter 11 apply the notions of abyssal lines and coloniality to study youth racialization in Norwegian media discourse to uncover a social ontology wherein difference is perceived as a threat.
Part 4 addresses localized dynamics of language learning and use. In chapter 12, Bassey E. Antia, Sinfree Makoni, & Joseph Igono demonstrate that Black African language speakers experience Whiteness, racism, patriarchy, and capitalism through specific linguistic forms and call for a reconstitution of Black African languages. In chapter 13, Shaila Sultana, Nuzhat Tazin Ahmed, Nahid Ferdous Bhuiyan, & Shamsul Huda show that communicative language teaching approaches in Bangladesh effectively marginalize and peripheralize indigenous ethnic communities. Mari Haneda in chapter 14 uses autoethnography to show how institutionalized processes of colonialism, gender, and language in Japan and North America pressured her to ‘embody the coloniality of being’ (275).
Lastly, Part 5 cogently brings together the main issues. Antia in ‘Epistolary afterword’ crafts a fictional letter inviting the reader to counter coloniality. In the epilogue, Kanavillil Rajagopalan traces the nature of race relations and racism to colonialism and capitalism to illustrate the untenable situation currently faced around the world.
Together, the chapters in this volume represent a powerful collection of papers that ‘propose a counter-hegemonic Sociolinguistics from/of/with the South’ (1). Building on a robust body of scholarship on the intersectional histories of colonialism, race, and patriarchy collectively referred to as the Global South, Southernizing sociolinguistics deconstructs profound imbalances in the production of knowledge in ways that are expansive and non-exclusive by centering and validating the Southern epistemologies of marginalized speakers and anti-colonial movements from plurilingual contexts worldwide.
