Globalization and subjective experience are a founding basis of contemporary research and understanding of language. This is the assumption underlying the texts compiled by Maryam Borjian. Following the editor's metalanguage, the book ‘offers stories’ that in drawing on Foucault's insights do not aim at telling absolute truths, but local ones, placing both subjectivity and contextuality of meanings at the heart of linguistic knowledge. Methodologically, the texts are connected by a commitment to both a context-bound dimension of knowledge and to the employment of ‘lived language experiences’ as analytical entry points. As such, the book is a very welcome contribution to current inquiries on language as a subjective experience, bringing autoethnographic accounts of language learning, teaching, researching, and challenging. By narrating the most diverse sociolinguistic environments, the authors tell their own experiences of language through ‘multiple theoretical lenses’ (4). According to the editor, the book's perspective is empirical rather than existential. In this review, I embrace this perspective, retell the stories in the book, and tell new ones.

Part 1 is titled ‘Theoretical and methodological frameworks: Issues, challenges, and changes’. While discussing different definitions of and approaches to globalization, Borjian (ch. 2) describes a trip through the semiotic landscapes of East Mexico in order to discuss semiotic perceptions and experiences of the effects of globalization. In a similar vein, Ulrich Ammon (ch. 3) draws on his linguistic experience in German schools to reflect on how varieties of language were observed and controlled, and how contingent the distinctions between language, dialect, and restricted code are. He discusses linguistic prejudice against second languages as well as linguistic disregard of nonstandard varieties. He raises important questions about linguistic discrimination, inequality, justice, and arrogance.

Part 2, ‘Global English: Views from the classroom’, takes us around the world in English classrooms to discuss topics such as (i) ‘Native speakerism’ (Pauline Bunce, ch. 6), a corrosive ideology in the designing of materials and methodologies that privilege linguistic performance and world perspectives of the ‘native speaker’; (ii) ‘postcolonial puzzle’ (Nigussie Negash Yadete, ch. 4), which can be described as the insufficiency of dichotomies such as ‘linguistic imperialism’ and ‘subaltern (re)action’ to describe people's feelings and attitudes toward language; and (iii) ‘English-only ideology’, in which Ruhma Choudhury (ch. 8) relates her experience employing ‘translanguaging’ as a pedagogic tool in the classroom, to foreground the argument that languages interact naturally with each other. If, as Borjian claims, the most unquestionable effect of globalization is the spread of English globally, then a great deal of discussion of it is to be expected. From Ethiopia (Negash Yadete, ch. 4) to New Zealand (Vaughan Rapatahana, ch. 5), from Hong Kong (Bunce, ch. 6) to South Korea (Elizabeeth J. Erling, ch. 7), English learning and teaching are discussed through different—even opposite—perspectives such as the ‘demonization and villainization’ of native speaker teachers (Erling, ch. 7) and the understanding of ‘English as thief’ (Rapatahana, ch. 5) that steals local linguistic and cultural experiences, as well as students’ own worldviews.

‘Given, made, inherited, achieved, shaped, shattered, (de)constructed, contested, negotiated’ (117) are adjectives Borjian uses to describe the ‘elusive’ concept of ‘identity’, whose relation to language is the topic of the third part of the book, ‘Language, identity and crossing the boundaries of the expected’. Chapters in this part discuss the experience of being named, interpellated (Joseph Sung-Yul Park, ch. 9), of being the speaker of a stigmatized language such as German in postwar Europe (Birgit Brocke-Utne, ch. 10) or a reflection on how Esperanto may challenge static conceptions of language (Humphrey Tonkin, ch. 11) and linguistic legitimacy to Armenian identity (Jennifer Manoukian, ch. 14).

Language is the terrain for life to thrive and death to lurk. In Part 4, ‘Language death and birth’, language endangerment is understood as an effect of liberalism as much as of globalization. This part highlights the negative outcomes of globalization toward small linguistic communities, both hidden in megacities like New York (Daniel Kaufman, ch. 12) or isolated like in Alaska (Bob Holman & Sam O'Hana, ch. 13). The stories in this part invite one of my own: in Brazil 2019, the far-right government is being negligent and silent about the growing assassination of indigenous teachers and political leaders since they came to power and reassigned the demarcation of indigenous land to the agribusiness department, whose minister has publicly assumed the project of expanding productive lands and bringing down preserved areas. I really appreciate the section for opening a space for critique while believing in change through awareness and conscientization. The assassination of linguistic minority communities has been an ongoing topic in the colonialist/neoliberal agenda, along with poor monolingual education and culture silencing. It also poses the provoking question: can there be linguistic rights where there are no human rights at all? Both in the book and in my own experience, some languages cannot be counted because they just do not count, just like the people who speak them. As Rapatahana (ch. 5:75) introduces in his poem: ‘on its colonies the sun never sets but the blood never dries’.

The discussions in this collection are presented through a variety of genres such as poetry (an ode ‘to my mother tongue’; Marwa Adina, Part 5, ‘Epilogue’), academic writing, and biographic narratives, complexly intertwined to discuss urgent matters on the relation between language and globalization, providing an irresistible invitation to think about subjectivity and language in the rapid and fluid semiotic movements of globalization. However, a deeper and more explicit engagement with an anti-capitalist critique could redesign politically subjective reflections on globalized matters. As a South American researcher, I feel that we researchers tend to be both blind towards our privileges and inclined to romanticize linguistic experience as independent from the economic dimension. I also believe the book provides theoretical encouragement to reimagining new subjective writings as celebrated traits of linguistic knowledge as a feature of ‘embodied linguistics’ (Bucholz & Hall Reference Bucholtz, Hall and Coupland2016). As I wrote elsewhere: ‘The presence of the author in the text in the form of first-person writing, the abundant adjectivation and the description of sensations highlight the event of narration and the feeling of corporality’ (Bonfante Reference Bonfante2018:152). I highly recommend the reading of the stories in this book. As suggested in Borjian (ch. 1), stories have been an inextricable part of human existence and can foreground transformation. Autobiographical ones can also be provoking, inspirational, and powerful, creating a space for a critique of resistance.