After several decades of critical sociolinguistics, understood as an analytical perspective aimed at understanding and dismantling the role of languages in the (re)production of social order, inequality, and dominant ideologies, sociolinguistic research has developed a reflexive and critical view of its own research practice in recent years.
This shift is essential, since the global academic field itself has a sociolinguistic component that must be critically analyzed and dismantled: the preeminence of English over other languages; the reproduction of genres and writing styles over formats coming from other intellectual traditions; the circulation of global academic journals and publishing houses that privatize production and access to knowledge; and epistemic extractivism, which alienates communities from their language, speech, and writing. Hence, it is often disorienting for intellectuals who research and write from the centers of global academic power (i.e. European and North American universities) to adopt ‘subaltern’ or ‘decolonial’ positions.
In this context, From southern theory to decolonizing sociolinguistics is a necessary and provocative book that adopts a decolonial perspective by positioning itself in different colonial contexts.
In both the ‘Introduction’ and ‘Concluding reflections’, the editors propose some parameters to organize the discussion and positions that can be read in their chapters. First, they show an explicit attitude of ‘disciplinary disobedience’ aimed at understanding languages, speakers, and communities, beyond the rules of the academic field, in which theoretical, methodological, and political discipline prevails. Second, a diversity of approaches to the writing and circulation of knowledge is explicitly proposed. This made it possible to include two interviews and two commentaries (which help to lighten the reading and point more precisely to some specific topics) but also helped to explore other writing formats different from traditional academic writing. Although most of the chapters adopt the classic paper structure, some, such as that of Sibonile Mpendukana & Christopher Stroud, manage to say new things with new writing formats. At this point, only Marcelyn Oostendorp challenges the dominance of English in her writing.
There is a third topic, common to the entire book, which the editors develop programmatically: it is a book of sociolinguistic theory. We, southern scholars, are used to being in the margins of such publications. If you read most of the mainstream handbooks on language or discourse studies, you will find that the major theoretical sections are authored by American or Western European authors, whereas Latin American, Eastern European, Asian, or African scholars usually write the ‘case studies’ section, empirically oriented and adding diversity and color to the rest of the book. The situation is usually worse for Indigenous scholars, who are often invited to provide experiences or insights but never to conceptualize or create theory for a wider audience. Therefore, a book that proposes sociolinguistic theory (and not just cases, data, or testimonies) by southern scholars, from colonial settings, with a decolonial perspective, is greatly appreciated.
The chapters of this book can be read through different paths, and readers are encouraged to follow them.
The first path explores and questions sociolinguistics’ theoretical canon. Alan S. R. Carneiro & Daniel N. Silva propose a critical dialog with mainstream sociolinguistics by explaining the work of six major Brazilian intellectuals and their contributions as sociolinguistic theorists. In doing so, the authors organize their exposition following two tropes, survival and hope, which not only describe and interpret language practices but also help shape a decolonial, collective intellectual project on its own. Also reimagining the canon, Alastair Pennycook's piece de-naturalizes the disciplinary boundary between ‘language use’ and ‘language learning’. In doing so, his chapter proposes abandoning the traditional metaphorization of language as described in discrete terms (such as vertical ‘levels’, or horizontal ‘circles’) or in land-based metaphors (such as trees, mangroves, or littorals). Instead, Pennycook advocates water-based metaphors as a radical departure from colonial epistemology. In a different direction, the chapter by Nana Aba Appiah Amfo & Dorothy Pokua Agyepong challenges Joshua Fishman's concept of ‘sociolinguistic domain’ by analyzing multilingualism in Christian religious practices in Ghana. They observe that there is no univocal association between ‘religious domains’ and ‘religious languages’. Instead, religion appears as necessarily intertwined with ‘secular’ practices, in a way that makes it impossible—or rather ineffective—to establish clear bonds between domains. Within this path of explicitly addressing core concepts from the sociolinguistic canon, Jane Akinyi Ngala Oduor proposes a manifesto for a language policy model able to localize multilingualism in the Global South by drawing theoretical and practical lessons from the East African Community. Unlike other chapters in the book, Oduor explicitly engages with language policymaking criteria, which can lead to further, practical debates. Finally, the conversation with Lynn Mario Menezes de Souza provides an insightful and reflexive account of decolonial thinking in linguistics. This chapter is a perfect example of productive positionality: by going through his own life, Menezes de Souza also shows how theory was actually read, discussed, and used. And by doing so, he is able to generate original and critical thinking, as in the case of his ‘hacking’ of Paulo Freire, by showing that not every critical and progressive southern author is, per se, decolonial. In a similar sense, although with a more limited scope, the conversation with Ellen Cushman reveals how, in her own intellectual biography, decolonial thinking was a creative and practical alternative to critical theory, which was very productive at describing power relationships but not at imagining alternatives.
Mpendoukana & Stroud analyze the work of Frantz Fanon by providing an original prism to understand decolonial thinking: love. Understood as the recognition and embracement of the other while respecting his/her ‘otherness’, without appropriating or reducing it, love appears as a form of knowing and acting with others. Thus, in a decolonial sociolinguistic project, it is not only an ‘attitude’ or ‘emotion’ but an epistemic position.
Two of the book's chapters provide a provocative, counterintuitive reflection about the political significance of communities’ perspectives in the design and implementation of language policies, although in opposing political directions. Singh's contribution demonstrates how right-wing nationalism in India advocates for a “pre-colonial” pure Hindi, by controlling and rejecting any linguistic, cultural, or ideological departure from tradition. Jaspal Naveel Singh's analysis, however, explains that this supposedly ‘pre-colonial’ traditional thinking actually reproduces a colonial idea of purity that, by homogenizing both language and communities, prevents minoritized groups from expressing and, ultimately, existing. Cristine Severo & Sinfree Makoni's chapter also critically reflects on the importance of indigenous communities’ voices in educational and linguistic policies, liberating the concept of (personal) ‘experience’ from a colonial, integrationist take. On the contrary, they propose to understand language experience as a political communitary process in which language, territory, speakers, and theory can generate decolonial knowledge and, thus, politics/policies of language. In doing so, they also avoid a form of ‘southern essentialism’ that opposes colonial Eurocentric knowledge to decolonial indigenous thinking, as if indigenous knowledge was a homogeneous worldview defined by the negative.
Lane's contribution provides an interesting case of ‘south in the north’ by showing how colonial narratives about nation, language, and ethnicity are present in Norway, as they pushed the Kven and Sami indigenous peoples to silence. This chapter analyzes this process throughout the years, reflecting not only on its social and political consequences, but also on the emotional and subjective aspects of language minoritization.
Oostendorp's contribution analyzes how humor can be an effective decolonial methodology that challenges dominant gender and race discourses. In an interesting reflexive move, she not only adopts humor as an object of discourse analysis but also as an act of epistemic disobedience on its own. In performing multilingual humor in her chapter, she also puts ‘decolonial sociolinguistics’ under scrutiny, thus alerting readers to the risk of making decoloniality a paradoxical new form of academic colonialism.
Finally, the book ends with two commentaries in which I found a very interesting way of including first readers into the writing. The first comment is by Crispin Thurlow, who provides a list of quotations from the book, thus fragmenting and re-constructing his own reading of the whole text. The second commentary, by Sangeeta Bagga-Gupta, draws attention to some common topics or dimensions of what he calls ‘second wave of southern perspectives’ that can be traced through all of the chapters: timescales, positionality, episto-methodologies, languaging, and ethics.
As I noted at the beginning of this review, the book is provocative and, as such, readers will not always agree with it. In some chapters it can be noted the risk of ‘homogenizing’ decoloniality and trying to turn it into something ‘quotable’, a paradoxically colonial effect of academic branding. There is also the risk of essentializing ‘southern’ perspectives and scholars and thinking that they are automatically progressive and decolonial; thus the relevance of analyses such as Singh's. Finally, the over-abundance of metaphors, narratives, and comparisons can obscure the reality we seek to understand. In short, poetic discourse is often more effective in formulating than in solving theoretical problems.
This, however, is no obstacle to the reading of an extremely interesting volume that shows the relevance of Southern thinking today, not only in critically reading mainstream sociolinguistics but also in proposing new paths for sociolinguistic thinking.
