Linguistic Circle

Speaker: Sinfree Makoni (Penn State University)

Title: Southern Multilingualisms: towards a decolonization of African sociolinguistics

Abstract: Contemporary sociolinguistic scholarship takes it as axiomatic that the world is multilingual. The conceptual shift towards multilingualism has, however, not been predicated on any prior philosophical analysis of the 'natures' of language (Hauck & Heurich 2018) or any systematic enquiry into the questions of which type of, and whose, multilingualism we are dealing with. In this presentation I seek to address the underlying notion of language in southern multilingualisms by drawing on 'assemblages' of southern epistemologies and indigenous ontologies based on metaphors complemented with indigenous cosmovisions such as 'Quilombism' (Severo & Makoni 2021), Manguebit (Deumert 2019), ubuntu-nepanthla (Pennycook & Makoni 2021), and the notion of 'entangled electrical wires' (Bou Ayash 2019) from sprawling urban slums. In the presentation I will illustrate how the use of the term 'lay person' from Integrational Linguistics can be utilized to facilitate a decolonization of applied linguistics because modern disciplines like Linguistics and Anthropology are 'viscerally' tied to colonialism (Rajagopolan 2020. Heller & McWhinney 2017). By taking into account indigenous ontologies and concepts from Integrational Linguistics I can start to move away from both monolingual and multilingual orientations to language and take on board insights which are not from the mainstream of language studies and thereby generate concepts about language which are appropriate to the Global South and paradoxically to the Global North as well (Pennycook & Makoni 2020).

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