This book brings to life initiatives among scholars of the south and
north to understand better the intelligences and pluralities of
multilingualisms in southern communities and spaces of decoloniality.
Chapters follow a longue durée perspective of human co-existence with
communal presents, pasts, and futures; attachments to place; and
insights into how multilingualisms emerge, circulate, and alter over
time. Each chapter, informed by the authors' experiences living and
working among southern communities, illustrates nuances in ideas of
south and southern, tracing (dis-/inter-) connected discourses in vastly
different geopolitical contexts. Authors reflect on the roots, routes
and ecologies of linguistic and epistemic heterogeneity while
remembering the sociolinguistic knowledge and practices of those who
have gone before. The book re-examines the appropriacy of how theories,
policies, and methodologies 'for multilingual contexts' are transported
across different settings and underscores the ethics of research
practice and reversal of centre and periphery perspectives through
careful listening and conversation.
Highlighting the potential of a southern sociolinguistics to articulate
a new humanity and more ethical world in registers of care, hope, and
love, this volume contributes to new directions in critical and
decolonial studies of multilingualism, and to re-imagining
sociolinguistics, cultural studies, and applied linguistics more
broadly.
