Southernizing Sociolinguistics

This innovative collection offers a pan-Southern rejoinder to hegemonies of Northern Sociolinguistics. It showcases voices from the Global South that substitute alternative and complementary narrations of the link between language and society for canonical renditions of the field.

Bassey E. Antia is Professor of Applied Linguistics at the University of Western Cape, South Africa. His research interests span across multilingualism, terminology, language and health, the politics of language, and Southern epistemologies. A co-edited volume, Decolonial Voices, Language, and Race, appeared in 2022 (Multilingual Matters). Previous work has included a monograph and two co-edited volumes. Sinfree Makoni is Professor of African Studies and Applied Linguistics at Pennsylvania State University. He has held a number of different positions in the United States and Southern Africa. He has published extensively in the areas of language in health, language policy and planning, and decolonial and Southern epistemologies. He is currently an associate editor of the Journal of Applied Linguistics and holds a number of honorary appointments in universities in Africa.

List of Contributors Acknowledgements Foreword Lynn Mario T. Menezes de Souza Introduction Bassey E. Antia and Sinfree Makoni Part I: The politics of the constitution of language, and its metalanguage, in the Global South Chapter 1: Can there be a politics of language? Reflections on language and metalanguage Christopher Hutton Chapter 2: Shallow grammar and African American English: Evaluating the master's tools in linguistics Arthur K. Spears Chapter 3: Multilingual socialization and development of multilingualism as a first language: Implications for multilingual education Ajit K. Mohanty Chapter 4: Questioning epistemic racism in issues of language studies in Brazil: The case of Pretuguês versus popular Brazilian Portuguese Lynn Mario T. Menezes de Souza and Gabriel Nascimento Chapter 5: Baptism of indigenous languages into an ideology: A decolonial critique of missionary linguistics in South-Eastern Nigeria Unyierie Idem and Imelda Udoh Chapter 6: Christian-lects and Islam-lects: On religious inventions of languages Cristine Severo and Ashraf Abdelhay Part II: Who gets published in sociolinguistics? Chapter 7: Black female scholarship matters: Erasure of black African women's sociolinguistic scholarship Busi Makoni Chapter 8: African contributions to four journals of sociolinguistics Evershed Kwasi Amuzu, Elvis ResCue, Bernard Boakye and Nana Aba Appiah Amfo Part III: Language in the Global South and the social inscription of difference Chapter 9: Begging for "authenticity": Language, class and race politics in South Africa Bongi Bangeni, Nwabisa Bangeni and Stephanie Rudwick Chapter 10: Mandarin Chinese as the national language and its discontents Uradyn E. Bulag Chapter 11: Minoritized youth language in Norwegian media discourse: Surfacing the abyssal line Rafael Lomeu Gomes and Bente A. Svendsen Part IV: Learning and the quotidian experience of language in the Global South Chapter 12: The lexico-semantics of Whiteness and its transactionalization in Black African languages Bassey E. Antia, Sinfree Makoni and Joseph Igono Chapter 13: Linguistic governmentality, neoliberalism, and Communicative Language Teaching: Invisibility of indigenous ethnic languages in the multilingual schools in Bangladesh Shaila Sultana, Nuzhat Tazin Ahmed, Md. Nahid Ferdous Bhuiyan and Md. Shamsul Huda Chapter 14: Making of an exile: An analytic authoethnography Mari Haneda Part V: Summing up Epistolary afterword: Letter to the prince Bassey E. Antia Epilogue: Every dog has its day; but the long-time underdog can't wait any longer for that day! Kanavillil Rajagopalan