37.629, Reviews: Entanglements: Sinfree Makoni, Unyierie Idem, Edwin Appah Dartey and Bassey E. Antia (eds.) (2025)

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Subject: 37.629, Reviews: Entanglements: Sinfree Makoni, Unyierie Idem, Edwin Appah Dartey and Bassey E. Antia (eds.) (2025)

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Date: 15-Feb-2026
From: Ozge Deniz [ozd5067 at psu.edu]
Subject: Applied Linguistics: Sinfree Makoni, Unyierie Idem, Edwin Appah Dartey and Bassey E. Antia (eds.) (2025)


Book announced at https://linguistlist.org/issues/36-2401

Title: Entanglements
Subtitle: Between Decolonial and Southernizing Linguistics
Series Title: Global Forum on Southern Epistemologies
Publication Year: 2025

Publisher: Multilingual Matters
           http://www.multilingual-matters.com/
Book URL:
https://www.multilingual-matters.com/page/detail/?K=9781836681090

Editor(s): Sinfree Makoni, Unyierie Idem, Edwin Appah Dartey and
Bassey E. Antia

Reviewer: Ozge Deniz

SUMMARY
The edited volume “Entanglements: Between decolonial and southernizing
linguistics” by Sinfree Makoni, Unyierie Idem, Edwin Appah Dartey, and
Bassey Antia offers a window into what a pluriversal linguistics might
look like when the co-existence of diverse ontologies and
epistemologies of language is taken seriously. As the fifth volume to
emerge from the African Studies Global Virtual Forum (AFGVF), it
brings together critical language scholars whose personal and
intellectual trajectories are entangled across languages, disciplines,
and geographies. The volume consists of twelve chapters and follows an
unorthodox book format, as most chapters are presented as
conversations, including the voices of both presenters and audiences
across the globe. Thus, the volume’s conversational structure
transcends boundaries between academic genres, modes of knowledge
production, and authorial voice.
The volume opens with a foreword by Cécile B. Vigouroux, who presents
the AFGVF as an alternative site of academic knowledge production, one
in which academia is practiced cooperatively, not competitively.
Central to this reimagining is a shift in how knowledge production is
understood: listening, instead of reading, is foregrounded as a
scholarly practice that reveals the multiple voices contributing to
one’s scholarship. Knowledge always emerges in dialogue with others,
but only insofar as one is willing to listen. At the same time, it is
shaped by one’s distinct ‘place of entanglement’ (Sundberg, 2015),
which is comprised of encounters, biographical experiences, and often
conflicting personal, social, political, and ideological positions. In
other words, one’s scholarship (i.e., what one studies and how and why
one studies it) cannot be separated from these unique sites of
entanglement. Vigouroux further adds, while scholarship is always
articulated from somewhere, listening is likewise conditioned by these
histories of entanglement. It is through openness to listening across
and connecting with others’ sites of entanglement that new ideas
become possible. Thus, each chapter stands as a testimony to knowledge
production as dialogic and relational, remaining open to
transformation through a care-ful act of listening to other ways of
thinking.
Each chapter engages with decolonial and/or Southern approaches to the
study of language in distinct ways. In the introductory chapter
(Political and Linguistic Entanglements), Sinfree Makoni, Unyierie
Idem, Edwin Dartey, and Bassey Antia illustrate how these two
approaches inform each other. The editors view decoloniality as a
concept that has its own life span and broadly define it as “an
epistemic adventure that seeks to recover subdued knowledges or
celebrate insights by African philosophers” (p. 1). Acknowledging its
Anglo-centric orientation, they further complement decoloniality with
Southern epistemologies, whose goal is to create a new conceptual
vocabulary and political grammar that are guided by three principles:
innovation, reanimation, and transgression. In this sense, the volume
opens up a space for experimenting with alternative ways of being,
knowing, and languaging in the pursuit of a pluriversal linguistics,
such as ‘thinking with water’ that aims to undo binaries and
hierarchies in linguistics.
The chapters advance a view of language as a social practice that
centers the language user, thereby enabling more nuanced
interpretations of language use across diverse contexts. In Chapter 2
(Southernizing linguistics), Lynn Mario de Souza argues for beginning
any linguistic inquiry from heterogeneity rather than homogeneity and
from plurilingualism rather than monolingualism. Influenced by
Khubchandani (1997) and Bakhtin (1981), De Souza conceptualizes
language as an entangled, context-specific practice in which meaning
emerges through ongoing, partial, and relational conversations among
interlocutors. Incompleteness and otherness are thus key to a
plurilingual view of language in that language cannot be considered
complete, as a decontextualized abstract code, nor monolithic, as a
distant and independent entity from other languages. In Chapter 3
(Ofelia García, Ricardo Otheguy and Sinfree Makoni: In conversation),
Ofelia García and Ricardo Otheguy extend the critique of language as a
bounded, enumerable entity by showing how dominant views of language
as a separate code have contributed to social injustices experienced
by bilingual students in U.S. schools. Having experienced the harmful
effects of such deficit-oriented perspectives, García and Otheguy
propose translanguaging as an empowering pedagogical framework that
centers the speaker and evaluates bilingual students holistically.
While the authors acknowledge the existence of named languages and
their material effects on speakers, they contend that viewing
bilingual students’ language practices as drawn from a unitary
repertoire, instead of from separate languages, can advance cognitive
justice. In Chapter 4 (Susan Gal and Judith Irvine: ‘Signs of
difference’: A conversation), Susan Gal and Judith Irvine provide a
broader lens on language and ideology as a social practice through
their semiotic analysis of ideological work. Rather than approaching
ideology as an object of inquiry, Gal and Irvine focus on ideological
work as a social action, that is, how people, guided by specific
assumptions and regimes of value, engage semiotic practices to
construct social differences and advance social projects. By comparing
ethnographic research from small towns in Hungary and Senegal, the
authors reveal that local residents deploy similar semiotic processes
to characterize main social differences within their communities
through contrast between austerity and elaboration. They conclude that
attention to semiotic processes (i.e., social differentiation through
rhematization, fractal recursivity, and erasure) makes possible
analytical comparisons across sites that might otherwise appear
incommensurable.
The chapters also seek to challenge Northern linguistic theories by
centering decolonial and/or Southern perspectives, calling for refined
conceptual tools to better explain linguistic phenomena in both the
Global North and the Global South. In Chapter 6 (Southernizing the
study of English as a lingua franca (ELF): In conversation), Stephanie
Rudwick brings to attention the politics of language and race in
discussions of ELF and critiques scholars who portray ELF as a neutral
medium of communication. Based on years of ethnographic research in
South Africa, Rudwick argues that this romanticized view of ELF
overlooks Southern realities, where English is not always empowering
and social inequalities—such as in the housing market—remain highly
racialized, as the way one speaks English may mark them as a Black
South African. She advocates moving the center of ELF research from
the Global North (Europe, in particular) to the Global South to better
advance the field, emphasizing that people’s linguistic practices are
shaped by racialized dynamics and multilingualism with English, rather
than by ELF in its idealized, neutral form. In Chapter 7 (African
youth language research: Stylects and decolonial practice), Ellen
Hurst interrogates the concept ‘youth language’ by drawing on her
research on African youth languages, such as Tsotsitaal in South
Africa, and argues that youth language practices can serve as forms of
decolonial practice. Hurst describes youth language as a set of
situated and contextual semiotic practices that employ a range of
strategies to distinguish it from other kinds of speech in the
community. However, she contends that youth language should not be
viewed as a distinct linguistic system, but instead as a register,
discursive performance, or stylect. By stylect, she refers to the
styling of extra- and paralinguistic resources in performance to
convey certain social meanings, such as an in-group streetwise and
non-conformist identity. Hurst highlights the usefulness of the
concept ‘youth language’ in emphasizing the creative and playful
practices among youth, but notes that its descriptive power is
limited, as similar language practices can also be deployed by people
of other ages or genders. She further stipulates that African youth
languages often reflect a decolonial ideology because they emerge
under conditions of inequality in post-colonial societies, rather than
from urban crime as is often assumed, and that they challenge dominant
power structures through use of ‘undisciplined’ language, whether via
lexicalization, metaphor use, or other strategies. In Chapter 5
(Living with lingua francas: English in Indonesia and Indonesian),
Joseph Errington questions the concept of ‘native speaker’ and
demonstrates how the historical development of Indonesian offers what
Comaroff and Comaroff (2012) describe as “the privileged insight into
the workings of the world at large” (p. 1) by highlighting alternative
relations between language, nation, and identity. Because Indonesian
has evolved to be a national language and lingua franca for
multilingual populations in Indonesia, the nation contains no native
speakers of Indonesian in the traditional sense. Consequently,
Indonesian is shaped through everyday use by speakers of diverse
vernaculars, which leads to locally inflected varieties that are
recognized as legitimate and practically connected to standard
Indonesian. On this basis, Errington claims that the national language
itself has taken on a plural character, a condition that unsettles
conventional assumptions about language, territory, and ethnicity and
provides a linguistic lens onto “newly imagined communities of
difference” (p. 140).
The chapters further highlight the need to start from local
understandings of linguistic phenomena to better connect disciplinary
concerns with people’s everyday experiences. In Chapter 1 (Sinfree
Makoni and Henry Widdowson: In conversation), Henry Widdowson states
that applied linguists must attend more carefully to Firth’s (1957)
‘context of situation’ and avoid assuming that the same factors
operate uniformly across different settings. From this perspective,
language-related issues should be approached ecologically, that is, in
terms of how language relates to users’ lived experiences. According
to Widdowson, language users do not experience language problems per
se; rather, they experience social problems that involve language.
Therefore, for a better understanding of human experience, applied
linguists must bridge the gap between what is identified as problems
within the discipline and what is actually experienced as problems by
language users. In Chapter 8 (Ontologies of English: In applied
linguistics, TESOL and beyond), Rachel Wicaksono extends this focus to
ontologies of language and shows that the ways people construe English
have direct implications for how scholars should conduct research in
applied linguistics. Wicaksono notes that, while English has long been
understood as a monolithic entity, recent developments (e.g., ELF)
have prompted scholars to reconceptualize it as a social practice. The
author also adds that new materialist and post humanist approaches to
language emphasize flat ontologies, in which all resources work
together to construct activity and meaning, and agency is distributed
among human and more-than-human actors. In light of these
developments, Wicaksono urges scholars to move beyond ontologies and
epistemologies toward ethics and consider how to engage ethically with
others within their shared environments.
The edited volume concludes with two chapters: Mary Louise Pratt’s
epilogue and Yecid Ortega’s palabras finales, which provide further
commentary on the volume and outline directions for future research.
Pratt cogently asserts that attempts to decolonize or southernize the
study of language must move beyond producing counter-discourses to
traditional linguistics and instead generate new ways of thinking
about language that open the possibility for alternative futures with
decolonized power relations. Ortega envisions these alternative
futures as a pluriverse of language relations, in which a linguistic
cosmos emerges through diverse political practices that do not
necessarily homogenize but rather converge in our entangled relations
with humans and more-than-humans.
EVALUATION
The edited volume makes a strong contribution to the growing body of
literature on decolonial and Southern approaches to linguistics by
convening language scholars who do not only generate
counter-narratives to their field but also challenge the foundational
assumptions about language that underpin it. Therefore, the volume
will be of particular interest to graduate students and faculty in
sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, and linguistic anthropology who
seek to explore language-related issues in diverse contexts from a
non-Eurocentric perspective.
With its conversational format, the volume also makes academic
knowledge production more transparent by allowing readers to witness
how scholars think through the social problems they encounter, develop
ideas, and collaborate with others. Academic publications are often
treated as the final products of an individual’s thinking on a given
subject, a framing that erases the many voices involved in their
production; by contrast, this volume shows that scholarly thinking is
always in flux and is continually transformed through conversations
with multiple interlocutors. In doing so, the volume brings to the
fore the process of knowledge production as much as its outcomes and
invites readers to engage with the ongoing dialogues across the
chapters.
Furthermore, the volume raises crucial points about the politics of
knowledge production. One key issue concerns the politics of
representation, that is, who is entitled to speak for whom. As De
Souza (Chapter 2) indicates, Southernizing linguistics engages
directly with this question: thinking with and from the margins
requires those who seek to disrupt hegemonic language ideologies to
recognize and abandon their privileges, embrace vulnerability, and
engage in mutual learning and conviviality with others. In other
words, it entails making visible scholars’ embodied positionalities in
their own work. Another major concern is the call for creating new
metalanguages, as existing categories (e.g., ‘youth language,’ ‘native
speaker’) often fail to capture people’s everyday language practices
across diverse settings. This raises a few critical questions for
scholars to pursue: where do concepts come from, how accurately do
they reflect people’s lived experiences, and how can new metalanguages
capture sociolinguistic realities in ways that do not reproduce yet
other forms of misrepresentation? And most importantly, who benefits
most from the circulating decolonial discourses? If these questions
are not thoroughly addressed, decoloniality risks narrowing its focus
on epistemic concerns at the expense of material realities experienced
by people (Rambukwella & Zavala, 2025). One last related issue
concerns theory production: who counts as a theory maker? Following
Connell (2007), theory originates in the everyday experiences of the
periphery but is often incorporated into the ethnocentric assumptions
of the metropole and thus becomes hegemonic. As the volume
demonstrates, decolonial and Southern approaches to linguistics
challenge these hierarchical power structures and illustrate the
importance of practicing horizontal forms of knowledge engagement, in
which scientific knowledge and lay perspectives coexist.
The volume opens up many avenues for future research by urging readers
to transcend disciplinary and geographic boundaries in their fields.
It invites scholars to ask: what can we learn about our own research
contexts by examining those of others, which may initially seem
unrelated, or by engaging with insights from other disciplines? For
instance, as discussed in Hurst’s chapter, how might African youth
language practices help better understand immigrant youth language
practices in Europe? Or how might gerontologists’ understanding of age
transform our conceptualization of ‘youth language’ in linguistics?
The volume further advocates taking the South as an epistemic vantage
point for comprehending our contemporary world, which Northern theory
has historically treated as a source of raw data to be extracted and
transformed into universalizing claims (see Connell, 2007).
Decolonizing or Southernizing linguistics does not mean rejecting
Northern frameworks outright—since the North and South cannot be
treated as ontologically separable—but rather demonstrates that
Southern perspectives can offer unique insights into the development
of linguistics, enriching notions of language across the globe and
helping the North to critically reflect on itself. Ultimately, the
volume shows that doing linguistics differently is not only possible
but generative, offering the field new ways to respond to current
planetary crises.
REFERENCES
Bakhtin, M. M. (1981). The dialogic imagination: four essays (C.
Emerson & M. Holquist, Trans.). University of Texas Press.
Comaroff, J., & Comaroff, J. L. (2012). Theory from the South or, how
Euro-America is evolving toward Africa.Routledge.
Connell, R. (2007). Southern theory: the global dynamics of knowledge
in social science.
Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003117346
Firth, J. R. (1957). Papers in linguistics 1934-1951. Oxford
University Press.
Khubchandani, L. M. (1997). Revisualizing boundaries: a plurilingual
ethos. SAGE Publications.
Rambukwella, H., & Zavala, V. (2025). Decoloniality and language
scholarship – a critical intervention. International Journal of the
Sociology of Language, 2025(296), 9-31.
https://doi.org/10.1515/ijsl-2024-0046
Sundberg, J. (2015). Ethics, entanglement, and political ecology. In
T. Perreault, G. Bridge, & J. McCarthy (Eds.), The Routledge handbook
of political ecology (pp. 117-126). Routledge.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Ozge Deniz (she/her) is a PhD candidate in Applied Linguistics and
African Studies at the Pennsylvania State University. Her main
research interests lie at the intersection of language and politics
within South-South migration contexts, with particular attention to
the sociopolitics of language learning among African international
students in Turkiye’s higher education institutes. She is also
interested in analyzing social media discourse from a social justice
lens.



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