Colonial and Decolonial Linguistics

Book excerpt: This wide-ranging volume offers a detailed exploration of coloniality in the discipline of linguistics, with case studies drawn from Africa, Southeast Asia, Europe, and the Caribbean. Colonial meanings and legacies have returned to the forefront of many academic fields in recent years and linguistics, like several other disciplines, has had an ambivalent relationship with its own histories of practice in colonial and postcolonial worlds. The implications of these histories are still felt today, as colonial paradigms of knowledge production continue to shape both academic linguistic practices and non-specialist discussion of language and culture. The chapters in this volume adopt a range of different conceptual frameworks - including postcolonial theory, southern theory, and decolonial thinking - to provide a nuanced account of the coloniality of linguistics at the level of knowledge and disciplinary practice; crucially, the contributors also expand their investigations beyond this ambivalent inheritance to imagine a decolonial linguistics. The volume will be of interest to all linguists looking to critically assess their own practices and to engage with debates at the cutting-edge of their discipline, particularly in the areas of sociolinguistics, field linguistics, typology, and linguistic anthropology, as well as to those outside the discipline engaging with questions of coloniality.