36.3836, Reviews: Language as Hope: Daniel N. Silva and Jerry Won Lee (2025)

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-36-3836. Sat Dec 13 2025. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 36.3836, Reviews: Language as Hope: Daniel N. Silva and Jerry Won Lee (2025)

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Date: 13-Dec-2025
From: Merijn Bastiaan Benning [merijn_1997 at hotmail.nl]
Subject: Daniel N. Silva and Jerry Won Lee (2025)


Book announced at https://linguistlist.org/issues/36-2507

Title: Language as Hope
Publication Year: 2025

Publisher: Cambridge University Press
           http://www.cambridge.org/linguistics
Book URL:
https://www.cambridge.org/universitypress/subjects/languages-linguistics/applied-linguistics-and-second-language-acquisition/language-hope?format=PB&isbn=9781009306546

Author(s): Daniel N. Silva and Jerry Won Lee

Reviewer: Merijn Bastiaan Benning

Title: Language as Hope
Subtitle: -
Series Title: -
Publication Year: 2025
Publisher: Cambridge University Press (
http://www.cambridge.org/linguistics )
Book URL:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/language-as-hope/D50E18AB271F1A401C7FF69297AB2600
Author(s): Daniel N. Silva & Jerry Won Lee
Reviewer: Merijn Benning
SUMMARY
Written by Daniel N. Silva and Jerry W. Lee, Language as Hope
(Cambridge University Press, 2025, 185 pages) consists of seven parts:
an introduction, five named chapters, and a conclusion. The book’s
central argument is that hope is not only expressed through language
but is produced through language. Supported by an array of
philosophical theories and scholarly literature, including Bloch
(1986), Deumert (2022) and Agha ( 2007), the authors draw on their own
fieldwork with communities in Brazil’s favelas. Favelas are
neighbourhoods developed without official regulation and are
characterised by poverty, a lack of governmental services and an
informal internal economy and social structure. Throughout the book,
the authors illustrate and accentuate their argument with a wide
variety of pop-culture examples and anecdotes. After a postscript
about recent political developments in Brazil, the book ends with a
reference list and an index. I now provide a description of each of
the seven parts of the book.
In the introduction, the authors establish the main aim of the book,
namely “to illustrate what language can teach us about the practice,
logic, and feasibility of hope into the twenty-first century” (Silva &
Lee, 2025, p. 1). In a world which “spells hopelessness for many
communities” (Silva & Lee, 2025, p. 3), the authors regard the study
of hope as increasingly relevant, requiring a pragmatic approach that
interacts with and listens to those communities, through a methodology
characterised by participant collaboration and a critical reflexivity
on the research process. A detailed summary of the book’s chapters
provides an overview of the main structure of the argument.
In Chapter 1, the authors conceptualise language as hope, expounding a
theorisation of hope that not only provides a framework for the
analysis of their data, but also enables them to discuss the relevance
of their argument beyond their case studies. Firstly, the authors
define language as an “inherently flexible and negotiable practice
that can reconstitute realities” (Silva & Lee, 2025, p. 18), drawing
on the concept of ‘languaging’ (Li, 2018). Then, the authors discuss
various conceptualisations of hope, most notably by Bloch (1986), as
affective, temporal, tactical, communicative and communal, and explain
how communities can produce hope through the reconstitutive properties
of languaging.
Chapter 2 provides the political and socio-historical context of the
favela communities, outlining the historical and present conditions of
inequality and precarity “that precipitate if not demand hopeful
futures” for those communities (Silva & Lee, 2025, p. 48). Despite
having the world’s largest population of African diaspora, Brazil has
a history and culture of anti-Black violence, which was exacerbated
during recent right-wing governments. However, although the
socio-economic inequalities and racial prejudice are
disproportionately concentrated in the favelas, those communities are
not only “spaces of seeming hopelessness” (Silva & Lee, 2025, p. 18),
but also of survival and hope, where activist individuals and
collectives engage in sociolinguistic acts “in the present to reorient
an unequal past” (p. 78).
Chapter 3 expands on this idea of hope as a collective reorientation
to time, centring around the case of Marielle Franco, a favela
activist and social scientist who was assassinated in 2018. The
authors analyse Marielle’s writings and speeches, and the activist
content created by the community after her death, in order to explore
the temporal dimension of hope. The authors argue that the community’s
language practices, for example the mantras ‘Marielle presente’ and
‘Marielle vive’ (‘Mariella, present’ and ‘Marielle lives’), exemplify
a “metaleptic orientation to temporality” (Silva & Lee, 2025, p. 80).
In other words, they are a way in which communities reconstitute the
temporal dimension as non-linear and non-chronological, bringing a
hopeful future to the present.
Chapter 4 explores hope as a language practice emerging from
sociolinguistic enregisterment. Language always operates within
systems of meaning and value (Agha, 2007), which regulate how language
is understood and what it can index (Gal, 2019), and which are shaped
by language ideologies. The authors focus on one such system emerging
in the favela communities: the activist register of ‘papo reto’ or
‘straight talk’. This translational register enables the
reinterpretation of bureaucratic political language so that it becomes
understandable to people excluded from elite educational and
communicative norms. Since such norms have long been used to reinforce
socioeconomic and racial inequalities, the ‘papo reto’ register is
chiefly concerned with singling out objects of discourse related to
those inequalities. As such, the authors argue that ‘papo reto’
“constitutes an enregistered style of enacting hope for people
acquainted with this register” (Silva & Lee, 2025, p. 122).
Chapter 5 examines how hope can be ‘scaled’ through pedagogical and
communicative practices, becoming “a principled, time-oriented
pragmatic praxis” rather than “merely an abstract aspiration” (Silva &
Lee, 2025, p. 20). The authors analyse the efforts of three community
collectives, each of which creates spaces where hope can be taught,
practiced and circulated. A key example is ‘Raízes em Movimento’s
reappropriation of ‘circulando’, a policing practice used to
criminalise favela residents. Through the annual event ‘Circulando:
Comunicação e Diálogo nas Favelas’, the collective rescales this term
as an opportunity for gathering, debate, and alternative political
expression, contesting state control over public space and language.
The analysis of the sociolinguistic scaling practices of these
collectives highlights that hope can be taught, communicated and
embodied, and so become “a form of social change” (Silva & Lee, 2025,
p. 125).
Finally, in the conclusion, the authors synthesise the book’s central
claim: that hope is enacted through the sociolinguistic practices of
marginalised communities, who reorient and reconstitute knowledge,
temporality and language itself. Drawing on empirical case studies,
underpinned by philosophical and academic literature, the authors
argue that hope is not an abstract future-oriented aspiration, but a
situated practice grounded in the present. The authors expound a set
of ethical and methodological considerations for researching hope,
addressing the history of exploitative research and calling for a
reorientation of knowledge towards reflexive and dialogic research
that acknowledges and includes the communities in question.
EVALUATION
Overall, the authors have achieved their aim to illustrate what role
language plays in the practice and feasibility of hope through their
discussion of a set of compelling case studies in Brazil’s favela
communities. In this book, the authors clearly show how hope is not
merely wishful thinking or an optimistic disposition towards the
future, but rather an act, something that can be practiced through
language. They do so by first carefully and clearly laying out the
philosophical and academic underpinnings of their argument, drawing on
a wide range of scholars. Then, through their application of this
theoretical framework in a thorough analysis and discussion of
innovative case studies, the authors make a series of original and
valuable contributions to the philosophy, anthropology and
sociolinguistics of hope. Firstly, their reconceptualisation of hope
as a language practice further develops the aspect of metaleptic
temporality, placing the futurity of hope (Bloch, 1986) firmly in the
present. Secondly, through the term ‘languaging hope’, the authors
analyse language practices as sites where hope is produced, providing
new perspectives to look at sociolinguistic processes such as
enregisterment (Agha, 2007) and translanguaging (Li, 2018). Lastly,
the authors emphasise and explain the need for a critical, reflexive
methodology in (anthropological) research that goes beyond tokenistic
positionality statements or faux-participatory methods, and they
present in their case studies concrete examples of what such a
methodology may look like.
The authors challenge the reader to engage with their theoretical and
conceptual groundwork, as they do not spell out the entire logical and
narrative structure of their argument, but rather let the connections,
implications and conclusions emerge as the reader progresses through
the book. Taking the reader seriously, the authors require the reader
to take this book seriously, to be attentive and to fully try to
understand what the authors mean when they use terminology such as
‘metaleptic temporality’ or ‘languaging hope’. However, the reader
would have been facilitated in their ability to engage with the book’s
central contributions if key concepts were used consistently
throughout the work. For example, the term ‘languaging hope’, which,
in the authors’ own words, “represents, in effect, the fundamental
theoretical core to the project of Language as Hope” (Silva & Lee,
2025, p. 23), is never mentioned again after Chapter 1. Nevertheless,
an astute reader who keeps that ‘theoretical core’ in the back of
their mind as they progress through the work will have no trouble
understanding the authors’ main points.
In my opinion, this book should be read by scholars conducting
qualitative research in the field of anthropology, sociology and
(socio)linguistics, because of its exceptionally strong theoretical
foundation and its persuasive argument for critical and reflexive
research, of which the three original case studies are excellent
practical examples. The authors’ work on the reconceptualisation of
language as hope opens two main avenues for further research,
theoretically and methodologically. Through their linkage of
‘languaging’  and ‘hope’, the authors set a precedent for further
sociolinguistic research exploring the conceptual connection between
‘languaging’ and abstract concepts such as hope, fear, love, and care.
Methodologically, they have provided great insights in how to
practically and ethically conduct ethnographic research in a way that
goes beyond empirical, exploitative epistemology without diminishing
the validity of their analyses, which will especially help researchers
working with marginalised communities.
In conclusion, the thorough and air-tight analysis and discussion of
the authors’ fieldwork research make an original and valuable
contribution to the sociolinguistics of hope in marginalised
communities. The book is a must-read for sociolinguists and
anthropologists alike, providing insight not only into the
multidimensionality of seemingly abstract concepts such as hope, but
also into the alternative ways we can conduct research with
marginalised communities, going beyond superficial, tokenistic
considerations.
REFERENCES
Agha, A. (2007). Language and social relations. Cambridge University
Press.
Bloch, E. (1986). The principle of hope (N. Plaice, S. Plaice, & P.
Knight, Trans.). MIT Press. (Original work published 1959)
Deumert, A. (2022). The sound of absent-presence: Towards formulating
a sociolinguistics of the spectre. Australian Review of Applied
Linguistics, 45(2), 135–153.
Gal, S. (2019). Making registers in politics: Circulation and
ideologies of linguistic authority. Journal of Sociolinguistics,
23(5), 450–466.
Li Wei. (2018). Translanguaging as a practical theory of language.
Applied Linguistics, 39(1), 9–30.
Silva, D. N. & Lee, J. W. (2025). Language as Hope. Cambridge
University Press.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Merijn Benning is a PhD candidate at the University of Groningen, the
Netherlands, specialising in the intersection of multilingualism and
transnationalism. His current research focuses on the role of language
in the caregiving practices of Latin-American migrants in the Kingdom
of the Netherlands, employing multimodal methods informed by
sociolinguistics and social network analysis. He has worked as a
secondary education teacher of Spanish, English and Dutch, and holds a
C1 qualification in Spanish from DELE. His broader interests include
family language policy, heritage languages, multilingual education and
newcomer education.



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