Diversities, affinities and diasporas: a southern lens and methodology for understanding multilingualisms

ABSTRACT

We frame multilingualisms through a growing interest in a linguistics and sociology of the ‘south’ and acknowledge earlier contributions of linguists in Africa, the Américas and Asia who have engaged with human mobility, linguistic contact and consequential ecologies that alter over time and space. Recently, conversations of multilingualism have drifted in two directions. Southern conversations have become intertwined with ‘de-colonial theory’, and with ‘southern’ theory, thinking and epistemologies. In these, ‘southern’ is regarded as a metaphor for marginality, coloniality and entanglements of the geopolitical north and south. Northern debates that receive traction appear to focus on recent ‘re-awakenings’ in Europe and North America that mis-remember southern experiences of linguistic diversity. We provide a contextual backdrop for articles in this issue that illustrate intelligences of multilingualisms and the linguistic citizenship of southern people. In these, southern multilingualisms are revealed as phenomena, rather than as a phenomenon defined usually in English. The intention is to suggest a third direction of mutual advantage in rethinking the social imaginary in relation to communality, entanglements and interconnectivities of both South and North.

KEYWORDS:

• Affinities
• diasporas
• decoloniality
• linguistic citizenship
• southern multilingualisms

Acknowledgements

We should like to dedicate this paper to four southern scholars who were part of our early journeys and discussions that have contributed to southern perspectives of multilingualisms, but who passed away while contributing to conversations and debates about southern multilingualisms. Richard Baldauf (2014), Richard Ruiz (2015), Tope Omoniyi (2017) and Gregory Kamwendo (2018). We also wish to acknowledge the Research Centre for Languages and Cultures at the University of South Australia that hosted the First Roundtable Meeting of the Southern Multilingualisms and Diversities Consortium in August 2014. Several of the papers in this Special Issue were first discussed at that meeting.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Kathleen Heugh is a socio-applied linguist with thirty years of research in multilingualism. She has advised 35 governments on language policy and education in Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe; and she led the first national sociolinguistic survey and the first system-wide multilingual assessment of secondary school students in South Africa. She has undertaken system-wide and multi-country studies in education for several governments and international development agencies. Together with Christopher Stroud she initiated the establishment of the Southern Multilingualisms and Diversities Consortium in 2012.

Christopher Stroud is Director of the Centre for Multilingualism and Diversities Research and Senior Professor of Linguistics at the University of the Western Cape; and Professor of Transnational Multilingualism at Stockholm University. He has worked extensively with a broad range of applied sociolinguistics issues in Papua New Guinea, Singapore, Mozambique South Africa and Sweden. He is currently involved in developing the notion of Linguistic Citizenship, a Southern and decolonial contribution to a politics of language, originally formulated as a critical response to the paradigm of Linguistic Human Rights. ‘The Multilingual Citizen’, co-edited with Lisa Lim and Lionel Wee was recently published by Multilingual Matters containing papers from a wide range of contexts dealing with the notion of linguistic/multilingual citizenship.

Notes

1. Noted in Africa at the National Language Project Conference held in Cape Town in 1991 (e.g. Agnihotri, 1992; Crawhall, 1992).

2. The use of the accented ‘é’ in Américas, is a semiotic signifier of a de-colonial stance to the conventional spelling and claim of the term ‘America’ as representative of North America and invisibilisation of Central and South America and the Indigenous or First Nations peoples across all of the Américas (see Kusch, [1970] 2010; Dussel, 1995).

3. Following Santos (2012) and Connell (2007, 2014), the concepts of ‘southern’ and ‘northern’ are not restricted to geopolitical locations of the south or north. Rather, they are metaphors that represent southern experiences of coloniality, exclusion and marginality, in contrast with northern hegemonies of colonial practice that continue in the ideological habitus of the present.

4. Writing in the late 1930s, Haarhoff was particularly concerned about the hegemonic and racist discourses accompanying the rise of fascism in Europe, and how such discourses might play out in divisive discourses in the separation of people along lines of monolingualism, monoculturalism and separate ethnicities in South Africa at the time. Haarhoff cautioned that such a trajectory would suffer the fatal flaw of the Greek Empire and could have only negative consequences.

5. Excerpt from an interview with Gerda de Klerk in 1994. See also the documentary film, Yo dude, cosa wena kyk a? The multilingual classroom (National Language Project, 1992).

6. The irony of writing this article, and the collection of articles here, in English does not escape us.