The historical relationship between linguistics and applied linguistics, one producing knowledge about language and the other applying it to real-world contexts, creates a hierarchy of linguistic knowledge, with linguistic knowledge at the top, everyday views on language at the bottom and applied linguistics somewhere in the middle, mediating between the two. This relationship has started to shift as applied linguists have sought to develop their own views of language based on their engagements with language users and contexts. A key framework for this book is a form of critical social realism that allows for more than one reality, grounds epistemologies in social relations and takes a critical-ethical position on choosing between different versions of the world. Central to this discussion are questions of ontology – what language is – and the ontological turn in the social sciences. Alongside ontological questions about what languages are, a related concern is whose version of language counts. Various ways of getting at this, from lay, folk and citizen linguistic perspectives, have emphasized this need to include knowledge of language from outside the disciplinary confines of linguistics. A practical theory of language surely needs a strong relationship with how language users think about language.

This essay investigates pre-battle omens and portents through three interpretative lenses: the ontological turn in anthropology, literary and historiographical criticism, and the cognitive science of religion. The Battle of Leuctra in 371 BC is used as a case study because Xenophon, Ephorus of Cyme, and Callisthenes of Olynthus recorded a uniquely large number of portents. Given that Leuctra fundamentally changed the balance of power in the Greek world, the various omens and portents described by our sources are fully consistent with the normative Greek worldview that signs were sent by the gods before important events. Scholars have been much more open to accepting that, despite some literary embellishment, the Greeks recognized omens retrospectively, but prospective omens are not improbable in a culture that was continually on the lookout for god-sent signs. The likelihood of prospective omens is confirmed by a comparative study of the omens that appeared to members of the Seventh Cavalry and to their Arikara scouts before the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876. We must avoid projecting a post-Enlightenment understanding of reality onto other cultures, thus devaluing the human dependence on communication with supernatural powers that was so central to the experience of the ancient Greeks.

The Introduction seeks to define cosmography. The first half of the Introduction takes Pindar's 3rd Olympian as a point of entry to illustrate cosmography with a concrete example. Building on that specific discussion and unpacking it, the second half of the Introduction moves on to more general considerations of a methodological and terminological order, so as to delineate the notion more explicitly, and the possibilities of its application, far beyond Pindar. All following chapters expand and build on these general considerations of the Introduction. The first chapter thus aims to explore the challenges and illustrate the significance of studying cosmography through cult and place. Through a complementary focus on the visual media of epiphany in language and art, the second chapter expands the investigation of the first chapter on the cosmography of cult and place. The third chapter aims to further explore the challenges and illustrate the significance of studying cosmography through an archive of genres and chronological periods. The fourth chapter looks more closely at the conflicts of knowledge and authority that punctuate the transformations of cosmography in the Classical period. The distinctive creativity of Hellenistic cosmography, finally, is the main object of the fifth chapter.

The questions of ontologies of English that this book poses come at a time of epistemological change in the fields of socio- and applied linguistics. The very fact that we can talk of ‘socio- and applied linguistics’ points to the coming together of these fields in ways that have usefully unsettled both. The translingual turn (García and Li Wei, 2014), for example, derives not so much from theoretical debates about language as from contexts of language education. Likewise, the ontological questions being asked in this book come from an applied linguistic orientation: most of the authors here are engaged in various aspects of English language education. This is a welcome move since it brings a theoretical debate about ontologies of English into a field often hampered by its pragmatism, while investigating these questions in the light of practical educational concerns (how does this matter for ELT practices?). There has been an unfortunate tendency to leave such questions to so-called ‘theoretical’ linguists, a serious oversight both because linguists have often failed in their task by assuming that the object of linguistic investigation – language or languages – is a known and settled entity (even if the epistemological questions of how it can be analysed have spawned a wide range of theoretical camps), and because applied linguists have failed as a result to ask the all-important questions that derive from a field of practice (Kramsch, 2015): what is it we’re actually dealing with?

In our introductory chapter, we argued that applied linguistics must be more explicit about the ways in which English is conceptualised in and for the domains of language learning, teaching, and assessment. Now, after eighteen chapters that uncover, advocate, and contest beliefs about the nature of ‘English’ in a range of contexts and from a range of perspectives, we take stock of the project and consider its uses. We don’t have the space here to reference all the arguments and evidence put forward by the authors of these chapters, but we will emphasise those points that we feel have helped to meet the aims of the book. Naturally, we give particular consideration to Pennycook’s companion commentary in the previous chapter.

This book is about the ways in which English is conceptualised in and for the domains of language learning, teaching, and assessment. Examining and being explicit about what we, as applied linguists, think English is – our ontologies of English – and how these ontologies underpin our educational ideologies and professional practices, should be an essential component of research in the discipline. Yet the nature of the ‘EL’ in ELT does not feature anywhere nearly as much as the ‘T’, and how English is conceptualised in schools tends to be debated more by educationalists than applied linguists. Teachers, learners, policy makers, and other stakeholders do have strong beliefs about what counts as English, who it belongs to, and how it should be taught, learned, and tested. In research we conducted with colleagues at a university in China (Hall et al., 2017), English teachers told us about the ways they conceptualised English as a global language and, more narrowly, as the subject they taught to undergraduate students.