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.
Ana Deumert, Professor, School of African and Gender Studies, Anthropology and Linguistics, University of Cape Town, Anne Storch, Professor, Institut für Afrikanistik und Ägyptologie, University of Cologne, Nick Shepherd, Associate Professor, Department of Archaeology and Heritage Studies, Aarhus University
Ana Deumert is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Cape Town. She works within the broad field of sociocultural linguistics, with a strong transdisciplinary focus. Her current work explores the use of language in global political movements as well as the contributions that de-/anti-colonial thought can make to (socio)linguistic theory. Her many publications include
Introducing Sociolinguistics (with Rajend Mesthrie, Joan Swann, and William Leap; Benjamins, 2009) and
Sociolinguistics and Mobile Communication (Edinburgh University Press, 2014). She is a recipient of the Neville Alexander Award for the Promotion of Multilingualism (2014) and the Humboldt Research Award (2016).
Anne Storch is Professor of African Linguistics at the University of Cologne. Her work combines contributions on cultural and social contexts of languages, the semiotics of linguistic practices, colonial linguistics, epistemic language and metalinguistics, and linguistic description. Her publications include
Secret Manipulations (OUP, 2011),
A Grammar of Luwo (Benjamins, 2014), and
Language and Tourism in Postcolonial Settings (with Angelika Mietzner; Channel View, 2019), She is co-editor of the journal
The Mouth and a recipient of the Leibniz Prize (2017).
Nick Shepherd is Associate Professor of Archaeology and Heritage Studies at Aarhus University and Extraordinary Professor at the University of Pretoria. His current projects are focused on walking as a form of embodied research practice, and on the politics and poetics of water in the Anthropocene. He has held visiting positions at Harvard University, Brown University, the University of Basel, and Colgate University. His recent publications include After Ethics: Ancestral Voices and Post-Disciplinary Worlds in Archaeology (with Alejandro Haber; Springer, 2014) and The Mirror in the Ground: Archaeology, Photography and the Making of a Disciplinary Archive (Jonathan Ball, 2015).
