The genesis of this book traces back to the beginning of the COVID pandemic, a time when the world ground to a halt, in the wake of the erosion of our familiar ways of human connection. It had become apparent that we needed innovative approaches to stay connected. This period marked a revolution in dialogues, witnessing diverse ways of thinking and languaging due to increased engagement with synchronous and asynchronous digitally mediated platforms such as Zoom and WhatsApp as well as social media communities, especially on X (formerly known as Twitter). However, the dialogues in the book extended beyond mere conversation, delving deeper into critical societal issues surrounding identity, language, and power dynamics. We believed this edited book could serve as an instrument for constructing a junction of dialogue, storytelling, critical listening, creativity, and consequently, fostering love, peace, and social change.
Outlined below are three key takeaways from this book, along with suggested ways of utilizing it:
Dialogue as Knowledge Construction: Think of the conversations you had in the faculty lounge, hallways, or restrooms with your colleagues and how it often ignites creativity thereafter. This book guides us on repurposing our discussions for generating knowledge. While retaining the conversational tone, each chapter demonstrates how we can analyze live discussions for further actionable steps. We hope to inspire diverse and mindful ways of reflecting and analyzing daily dialogue, leveraging them for transformative change.
Dialogue as a Pedagogical Practice: Acknowledging that our identities and language practices influence classroom pedagogy, many chapters employ collaborative autoethnographic approaches to reflect on classroom practices. This book offers insights into diverse pedagogical ideologies and outcomes. Teachers can use these narratives as a “fishbowl” activity to model reflective practices or writing. Each chapter provides end-of-chapter questions for further exploration.
Dialogue as a Research Method and Writing: Dialogue serves as a driving force for inquiry, becoming not only data for subsequent reflection, but also the very methodology by which we can record discursive data via digital media. Just as Suresh Canagarajah suggests in the Foreword, our thoughts and languages engage in a constant dialogue with previous encounters—let’s recognize dialogue as a legitimate qualitative research methodology. This book serves as an excellent example and resource guide on how dialogue can humanize research as a meaningful social practice by unraveling complex voices and dimensions within research.
The book represents a few varied approaches to explore the cycle of dialogue, reflection, and action. We encourage you to advocate for your school district or university to acquire a copy, utilizing it in qualitative methodology educational research for faculty or as a collaborative model in Diversity and Inclusion professional development activities. Let’s sustain and further enrich the ongoing dialogue.
For more information about this book please see our website.
If you found this interesting, you might also like Shades of Decolonial Voices in Linguistics edited by Sinfree Makoni, Cristine Severo, Ashraf Abdelhay, Anna Kaiper-Marquez and Višnja Milojičić.
We recently published Centering Multilingual Learners and Countering Raciolinguistic Ideologies in Teacher Education by Jeff Bale, Shakina Rajendram, Katie Brubacher, Mama Adobea Nii Owoo, Jennifer Burton, Wales Wong, Yiran Zhang, Elizabeth Jean Larson, Antoinette Gagné and Julie Kerekes. In this post Jeff explains how the book contributes to the field of teacher education and multilingualism.
“I feel like you’re judging…I don’t know if judging is the right word, but you’re marking somebody on the way they speak. Then, if you hear another person in a different situation, who’s not an English language learner, you might find the same things…[but] then they’re not marked or judged differently…It feels like you have to jump like an extra hoop, like through an extra hoop, you know, constantly.”
Luciana, a multilingual future teacher of math for Grades 4-10, expressed these concerns about assessing English learners in an interview with our research team. Luciana was referring to the English-language assessment tool used in Ontario, and the activities she had been asked to complete with this tool in a required seminar called “Supporting English Language Learners” in the teacher-education program at OISE, University of Toronto. Throughout the conversation, Luciana reflected on her own experiences of constantly having to prove her proficiency in English (as a student in Mexico, where she grew up; to attend university; to get permanent residency in Canada). These experiences led Luciana to question the purpose of assessing English learners, whether it had anything to do with actual language practices, or if the goal were rather to mark certain learners, to make them “jump through an extra hoop, you know, constantly.”
Luciana’s concerns provide powerful examples of what Daniels and Varghese (2019) theorized as white institutional listening, namely how teacher-education programs normalize the raciolinguistic ideologies (Flores & Rosa, 2015; Rosa & Flores, 2017) about Whiteness and standardized English that dominate in Canadian schools. In our book, we analyze how teacher candidates – especially those like Luciana who speak languages racialized in Canada – make sense of new knowledge about supporting multilingual learners in relation to this racial and linguistic ordering. We traced the dynamic shifts in thinking and practice as participants drew on their personal, professional and academic experiences to interpret what it means to work with multilingual students in the classroom.
Our book makes three important contributions to the growing scholarship on teacher education and multilingualism. The first is its analytical scope. At times, we zoom in on interviews with teacher candidates or the major assignments (e.g. lesson plans) they created for the required seminar mentioned earlier. We also provide close analysis of their learning based on Me Map videos we co-created with multilingual youth, in which youth told us about themselves, their friends and family, their ambitions in school, and their languages and cultures. Other times, we consider the 500+ responses we received from teacher candidates in our program on a pedagogical content-knowledge test about supporting multilingual learners. Complementing this broader perspective are interviews with ESL teachers and teacher-leaders, as well as teacher educators in Ontario’s other pre-service programs. Finally, we situate these various levels of analysis within a reading of the policies that govern teacher education in this province. The breadth of this research design allowed us to identify clear connections between different levels of policy appropriation: the policies themselves, teacher-education curriculum, course design, and the lived experiences of multilingual youth, teacher candidates, and teacher educators.
Second, our book identifies the siloed divisions in scholarship of language, race/racism and teacher education. Few applied-linguistic studies of multilingualism and teacher education frame their inquiry in relation to race/racism or (de-)colonization, although this is starting to change. Similarly, critical anti-racist and decolonial scholarship on teacher education only rarely considers multilingualism or language education. In the book, we reflect on how these disciplinary divisions impacted our own study. We describe the shifts in our own thinking and offer them as an example of teacher-education research that takes the relationship between language and race/racism seriously.
Finally, our book makes an important intervention about the ethics of publishing research. There is growing interest in the ethics of doing applied-linguistic research (e.g. de Costa 2016; Pinter & Kuchah, 2021). But how scholars disseminate our work in ethical ways is not often considered. Ours was a complicated study. We were lucky to have a talented group of doctoral-student researchers on the project for almost its entirety. Far from just ‘carrying out’ the work that I as PI, or Antoinette and Julie as co-PIs had conceived, the entire team was responsible for designing, conducting and analyzing the data. The only ethical choice for us was to honour this collective work and share in the writing of this book. It made the writing process a bit more complicated with 10 co-authors! But we think the result is more robust and interesting. We hope you agree.
For more information about this book please see our website.
We recently published Language and Antiracism by José L. Magro. In this post the author introduces us to the concept of antiracist pedagogy.
Look at the artwork on my book cover. What do you see?
I am not sure if my rusty graffiti skills were able to represent the purpose of this book: fighting racism within curricula, within the classroom, any classroom. Although the interdisciplinary orientation and examples provided are based on the language classroom, concretely the Spanish language classroom, I tried to express through my graffiti on the cover that, to fight racism, we must take action and decolonize the curriculum, bring the margins to the center (represented as black and brown arrows on the book cover) and decenter/abnormalize hegemonic language, that language traditionally normalized as the higher status, better, more powerful/valuable/prestigious/valid language (represented in the cover as a white tongue in the form of an arrow pointing to the right). In this process of inferiorization of certain languages/language varieties, these ideological views about language go beyond the linguistic sign, they inferiorize communities: we are what we speak, and we speak what we are.
We have at our disposal so many explanatory and exciting theories within the field of raciolinguistics and about power, language, and identity in general; part of this theoretical body is easily accessible and understandable, part of it is more obscure and unreachable for non-experts. You may already be familiar with this theoretical body or become familiar with it after reading the first part of this book, but when you face your students in the classroom, what? Furthermore, what about if you are not an expert and just interested in how language and racism intertwine or simply curious about how a Hip-Hop professor utilizes, in a very Hip-Hop style, the tools available to him to create content that may help promote a significant change in the way students think about language and use language?
For experts in education and applied linguistics, and related fields such as second language acquisition and literacy, this book will not only help you to get closer to the fascinating field of raciolinguistics, but also to connect that theoretical world to practice through concrete examples. In doing so, the non-expert reader will be able to understand the fascinating theory that supports the activities proposed in this book because, although they were developed to be used by educators, they are created and explained for (non-expert) students. Moreover, in this book, you will learn about definitions of racism and antiracism and about how positionality plays a fundamental role in the non-neutral endeavor of teaching languages; you will learn about a traditional Spanish language department in the United States, its actors, and the ideologies (re)produced in it; you will hear the voices of students exposed to the materials I propose; you will know about how Spanish language learning in the United States links to broader political struggles. This book will even address the curiosity that people who follow me as an MC have shown for years about my experience in academia in the United States.
If you are interested in the path towards antiracism, this book, regardless of your level of expertise, will provide you resourceful tools based on the relationships between language, identity and power.
Dr. José Magro
[él/he]
Assistant Clinical Professor
Department of Spanish and Portuguese/SLLC
University of Maryland magro@umd.edu
For more information about this book please see our website.
If you found this interesting, you might also like Spanish So White by Adam Schwartz.
We recently published Communication that Counts by Pia Patricia P. Tenedero. In this post the author dispels the myth about accountants and poor communication.
More than a decade of teaching English language courses to accounting professionals and students in the Philippines has shown me that these people are serious about improving their English skills. They are among the most eager and diligent adult learners I have had the joy to teach. While they are not all A+ students, it is NOT true that they are poor in communication any more than professionals and students in other disciplines. But somehow, their number-smartness seems to be constantly leveraged against their identity as corporate communicators.
“Accountants are not good communicators.”
Echoes of this complaint have motivated me to interrogate it. Is it true? Certainly, it is easy to believe especially with the introverted quant persona repeatedly portrayed in movies, and the skills gap discourse reported in mostly Anglophone-based communication research. But as in all stereotypes, its truth has limits.
To uncover the limitations of this claim, Communication that Counts unpacks the issues by clarifying what counts as ‘good communication’ in globalized accounting schools and workplaces? Who sets these norms? For what ends? In the process, the book challenges other deeply held beliefs about language, higher education, and the workplace.
“The language curriculum should be aligned with workplace practices to ensure the communicative competence of future accountants.”
I partially agree with this and propose some practical innovations in the communication training provided to future accountants. (In January 2023, I begin teaching Communicating for Globalized Accounting, an elective course based on the findings of this study.) At the same time, I caution against viewing perfect alignment in school-workplace communication practices as a panacea to the supposed gap in the communicative ability of university students. It is an impossible target, to begin with! Higher education and the workplace are interrelated domains, yes, but they also have distinct goals. School is only partly a preparation for the workplace, so we can only target partial alignment at best. This dynamic, however, does not make schools any less of a ‘real world’ than corporate and home offices. Naturally, what happens in accounting schools is not an exact replica of what happens in accounting workplaces, including how teachers, students, and practitioners communicate, what languages they use, and who they view as effective communicators.
“English is the language of global accounting.”
I also examine this, and other ideas about language held by accounting students, teachers, employers and professionals. The way people think about languages is shaped by and, in turn, shapes language education and experiences. Yet we do not reflect on it enough. I believe it is especially important for language teachers like me to be more aware of our language attitudes as this affects the practices we (dis)allow in the classroom and which our students may expect to see in the workplace (a.k.a. ‘the real world’). But, as I’ve discovered in my ethnographic work with onshore and offshore accountants, English is, in fact, NOT the only language spoken or written in the highly multilingual and multicultural space of globalized accounting.
This book is based on a series of individual interviews with some of the most original thinkers and scholars who have researched the areas of decoloniality, language, race, and Southern Epistemologies. It gives insight into how the seasoned authors have written about these topics and documents their interaction with the editors of the book and the participants of the Global Virtual Forum. Apart from the five conversational chapters, the book contains a Foreword (by Prof. Alastair Pennycook), an Introduction in which the co-editors present personal vignettes and methodological reflections about the production of the volume, and an Epilogue authored by co-editor Prof. Bassey E. Antia. This book is part of the Global Virtual Forum, which is an open and politically engaged virtual space.
Global Virtual Forum: ‘Shifting the Geography of Reason’
The Global Virtual Forum — led by Prof. Sinfree Makoni and co-organised by Prof. Bassey E. Antia, Kim Hansen, Rafael Lomeu Gomes, Magda Madany-Saá, Chanel van der Merwe, Višnja Milojičić, and Phoebe Quaynor — is a convivial space of robust engagement with knowledge-making and knowledges about/on/in/from/with the Global South(s). It fosters collegiality and dialogue, using the technologies essential to productivity during the pandemic that have served our collective benefit. As such, it has engaged a truly global and multicultural audience, united not by discipline but by a search for complementary and alternative perspectives to the prevailing epistemological orthodoxies. Video recordings of sessions of the Forum can be found on the Pennsylvania State University African Studies Program YouTube channel.
Critical Reception of the Forum
“The Global Forum has been to me a much-needed breath of fresh intellectual air. No ego performance, just the pleasure of thinking together in the most constructive and collaborative manner. This is how I have always envisioned academic work but never experienced it until now.”
Cécile Vigouroux
Simon Fraser University
Editor, Language, Culture and Society
“‘Every generation has its mission to fulfil or betray’, wrote the great Frantz Fanon. The Forum is playing a crucial role in fulfilling the mission of bringing truth to an age marked by tendencies to leap into the arms of pleasing falsehoods instead of embracing displeasing truths.”
Lewis Gordon
Professor and Head of Philosophy at UCONN-Storrs; Honorary President, Global Center for Advanced Studies; Honorary Professor, Unit for the Humanities at Rhodes University (UHURU), South Africa; Visiting Professor, University of Johannesburg, South Africa; and Chairperson of the Awards Committee, Caribbean Philosophical Association
“I appreciate very much the fact that the Penn State Global Forum has made so evident the need to decolonize knowledge construction and has engaged the participants with so many different and complementary perspectives on a wide range of topics. The post-presentations discussions have been so productive!”
Salikoko S. Mufwene
University of Chicago: The Edward Carson Waller Distinguished Service Professor of Linguistics and the College Professor, Committee on Evolutionary Biology; Professor, Committee on the Conceptual & Historical Studies of Science; Professor, Committee on African Studies
Global Forum on Southern Epistemologies: Book Series
Decolonial Voices, Language and Race is the first volume of the newly established Global Forum on Southern Epistemologies book series. This series consists of remarkably accessible volumes of ‘conversational chapters’ involving presentations by established and emerging global thinkers, activists and creative writers who seldom appear in the same collection. In the series, we have been particularly interested in the ‘geopolitics of knowledge’ as it pertains to language studies and many of the volumes will illustrate how scholarship in the Global North is partially indebted to diverse traditions of scholarship in the Global South(s). Ultimately, our concern is not only epistemological; it is also political, educational and social. We experiment with the format of the book, challenging the colonial concept of a single monologic authorial voice by integrating multiple voices, consistent with decoloniality and the politically engaged nature of our scholarship.
Members of the Series’ International Advisory Board: Jane Gordon, Alastair Pennycook, Oyeronke Oyewumi, John Joseph, Sibusiwe Makoni, Jason Litzenberg.
For more information about this book please see our website.
This month we published Liberating Language Education edited by Vally Lytra, Cristina Ros i Solé, Jim Anderson and Vicky Macleroy. In this post the editors reveal what readers can expect from the book.
Liberating Language Education emerged from our desire to unite our passion about language, education, and lived multilingualism with our visions of what language education can mean, feel, and look like in times of unprecedented change and uncertainty. This passion is reflected in our personas of ‘the weaver’, ‘the fool’, ‘the traveller’ and ‘the activist’ in the introduction of the book: they illustrate the complexity and richness of language experience and language learning across the lifespan and highlight the entanglements of the personal and biographical with the historical and socio-cultural dimensions of language and language pedagogy.
This kaleidoscopic perspective is amplified by the plurality and heterogeneity of voices and orientations manifested in the chapter contributions. The book calls into question a single and unified approach to language, culture, and identity, dismantling monolingual and prescriptivist discourses of pedagogy that have long dominated language education. Instead, it proposes new ways of understanding language and language education that move beyond rationalist and instrumental perspectives and emphasise locally situated meaning-making practices, messiness, and unpredictability.
These new ways liberate our understanding of language to encompass the full range of semiotic repertoires, aesthetic resources, and multimodal practices. They reimagine language education from a translingual and transcultural orientation, showcasing multiple, alternative visions of how language education might be enacted. The translingual, transcultural and transformative approach to pedagogy that underpins the book rests on the following principles:
an integrated and inclusive view of language and language learning
challenging binaries and fixed positions between formal/informal learning, school/home literacies, schools/other sites of learning
attention to language hierarchies and linguistic and social inequalities
a synergetic relationship between language and culture
the transformative process of language learning as reconfiguring our existing communicative resources and nurturing new ways of being, seeing, feeling and expressing in the world
foregrounding embodied, material and aesthetic perspectives to pedagogy
emphasis on learner and teacher agency and making their voices heard
supporting multiple ways of knowing and a decolonising stance to knowledge building
creating trusting, respectful and collaborative relations in research and shared ownership of knowledge
This critical and creative translingual and transcultural orientation repositions teachers, learners and researchers as active language policy creators in the remaking of language education today.
Vally Lytra, Cristina Ros i Solé, Jim Anderson and Vicky Macleroy
For more information about this book please see our website.
Language Maintenance, Revival and Shift in the Sociology of Religion is dedicated to the memory of two great minds, Tope Omoniyi and Joshua Fishman, who revealed to sociolinguists and sociologists the interconnectedness of language and religion. Inspired by their insights, we are proud to present this volume, which includes the work of scholars from different parts of the world, working on a range of languages and faiths.
One of the striking features of this volume is the authors’ use of multidisciplinary approaches and perspectives regarding the relationships between language, religion and society, which significantly enhances our understanding of the phenomena. The landscape of this collection covers a vast terrain of geographically and historically diverse societies across the globe with astonishing variation in their sociopolitical and religious conditions and their influence on the maintenance, revival and shift of languages.
Presenting rich, empirically validated data evaluated within sound theoretical frameworks, this volume will be a valuable resource for scholars who would like to discover local (culture and region-specific) as well as global (universal) determinants of the phenomena of maintenance, revival and shift of languages and religions in past and current social settings.
Readers can travel to diverse locations including Algeria, England, India, Israel, Malaysia, Nigeria, Singapore, Uganda and the United States to discover how religious traditions and practices impact the trajectory of languages such as Arabic, Hebrew, Malay, Mandarin, Pali, Portuguese, Punjabi, Sanskrit and Yoruba. They can explore the intersectionalities of language, religion, identity, policy, and history in societal and educational contexts through the research and interpretations of international scholars through this unique volume.
For more information about this book please see our website.
How often have you encountered a colleague, for instance at an international sociolinguistics conference, who started talking to you about Bakhtin? And how often did you subsequently engage in a somewhat vague and not very satisfying discussion about some of Bakhtin’s central concepts like heteroglossia or chronotopicity?
Over the last few years, chronotopicity has received renewed attention, not only in the field of literary studies where Bakhtin coined it, but also in other scientific fields. The inseparability of time and space also applies to, for example, social interaction and recently several scholars have shed new light on the possible contributions of the concept of chronotopicity to theorizing in sociolinguistics. This almost automatically led to questions on whether and how the concept could be used in empirical, mainly ethnographically-oriented sociolinguistic research.
In our edited volume Chronotopic Identity Work, we attempt to bring together a variety of empirical studies that put some flesh on the bones of the rather abstract chronotopic theorizing as presented thus far in the field of sociolinguistics. By doing so, we aim to show how Bakhtin’s concept of chronotopicity can be used for unraveling the intricate relationships between language, culture and identity in an era of globalization, digitalization and superdiversity.
Our cooperation with colleagues who agreed to face the challenge of using chronotopicity as a central concept in their research has taken us to:
young adults in Mongolia interacting on Facebook through mixed and inverted language practices;
fame-seeking identity plays by so-called baifumei (white, rich, beautiful, young women), within the Chinese ‘attention economy’;
changes in picturing bureaucratic personhood through descriptions with deictics in local newspapers in Indonesia;
touristic entertainment in a former traditional rural neighborhood in China;
the commodification of cultural heritage and identity work in an ethnic minority community in Enshi, China;
navigations of teachers and students between different language regimes in a multicultural school in Denmark;
normative behavior and attitudes regarding different language resources in and around school situations in the Netherlands;
the construction and meaning of Polish identity in an immigrant community in a superdiverse neighborhood in Belgium.
We think this collection of sociolinguistic analyses through the lens of chronotopicity clearly illustrates how the concept can be used in empirical research and how it contributes to the understanding of identity work in relation to the context of time and space.
Sjaak Kroon and Jos Swanenberg
Department of Culture Studies & Babylon, Center for the Study of Superdiversity, Tilburg University (The Netherlands)
Many years ago, I took the bus every morning to my office at the university in my home town Uppsala. One sunny spring morning I noticed unusual graffiti on the ground in front of my feet at the bus stop. It was a mysterious statement in Swedish: “Jag gav den orden” – “I gave words to it”. I was mesmerized. After that day, I found myself studying this graffiti on the concrete every morning for a long time, enormously fascinated. My thoughts always seemed to roam wildly when I stood there at the bus stop waiting for my bus. What did the scribbler mean? What was he/she thinking? What were the words? A linguistic act was suggested; and it was something that made me reflect on the power of words and language, the strength of this short sentence in front of my feet in this public space. A little graffiti that we can interpret in many ways. Words we give to each other, words we get and take from each other, and words we use are significant. They transform people into thinking and communicating beings.
Language deserves attention and especially today on International Mother Language Day.
30 years ago I got the opportunity to learn Finnish. In this picture I am with my host and good friend Ilpo in Riihimäki, Finland, in July 1992 at the end of my year as Rotary Exchange Student.
Many writers have tried to describe mother tongue with beautiful words and emotional expressions. Therefore, there is no point for me to try to describe mother tongue more exquisitely. Instead, I will simply allow myself to state that for me, the mother tongue is intimate – one of the most beautiful gifts an individual can have, and also the most important tool for communication and the way to the soul. Our mother tongues and languages are our treasures that no one can take away from us, as long as we care about and use them. But, is the mother tongue really the most important tool for communication and the most important key to the soul for everyone and in every circumstance?
I think that there is no one truth about languages and there is no single way to define mother tongue, although in my own case it is quite simple to argue that I have Hungarian as my mother tongue. Hungarian was the only language that my family used during my childhood and it was the only language that everybody used in my surroundings. It was also the majority language in Hungary, even though some other languages were visible in various contexts in Hungarian society.
Today, however, I can and want to add that happily enough I have two other named languages with me in my everyday life as well as in my heart. These two languages, my first second language Finnish and my second second language Swedish, which I learned later on in my life, are as equally close to my mind and heart as my Hungarian. I love them each just as much and they are equally important for me for to be able to express all my thoughts and all my feelings. In some situations it can be easier to choose and use one of my languages. Sometimes I benefit more from using one, while in other situations I benefit more from another one. And this is the joy with multilingualism! Also, these three languages – Hungarian, Finnish and Swedish – are my children’s first languages, which they have been socialized in since birth. I hope with all my heart that they feel that all three languages are their own mother tongue.
Most of the people around the world use more than one named language in their everyday life and many of them have more than one mother tongue, making them all the richer. In my research, I have met, among others, many second generation Hungarians in Finland and Sweden, people who were born and grew up in another country and in another linguistic environment than their parents did. I also have friends with Sámi origin, who speak or have connections with South, North or another Sámi language. All these people have varied attitudes towards languages, defining mother tongue not only as a language they know best in all kinds of situations and not either as the language of their childhood. Instead, many of them argue that Sámi is their mother tongue, regardless if only their parents or grandparents used it and they themselves do not have skills in the language at all. They do so because of strong emotional ties to the language and the associated culture. Their relationships to their parents, relatives and roots play an important role.
Today Boglárka has a multilingual repertoire and is Assistant Professor in Swedish as a Second Language at Dalarna University in Sweden
Roots, however, are not always the most crucial aspect when you define mother tongue, as every individual who has some kind of connection to one or more languages has the right to determine what to call that language or these languages. For example, some years ago I carried out a study where I interviewed elderly Hungarians who had moved to Finland or Sweden as young adults more than 40 years ago. Some of them have a purist view of language and have clear opinions on mother tongue, such as “the mother tongue is the language you are born with” or “the language you use without any obstacles in all domains”. However, these people could also contradict themselves and say that Finnish or Swedish was already or “almost” like their mother tongue – despite the fact that they had not learned these languages since birth nor did they use these languages in every situation. Many of these people do not draw boundaries between their languages. Rather, their languages are natural parts of their life and they use them unhindered in different situations and in different contexts. All of their languages are integrated in their repertoire.
I share the same feelings with them. I want to emphasise that it is wonderful to celebrate mother tongues and every mother tongue today, delighting in the fact that we all have right to determine which languages we want to celebrate as our own mother tongues. I personally do not want to only celebrate my Hungarian, but also my Finnish and my Swedish, too.
Finally, these words are for my beloved, old, and always wise close friend in Finland, who unfortunately does not have much time left to share with us in this life. This is for you who opened a way for me to find new linguistic and cultural spaces and gave me many wonderful years to speak about languages and enjoy the bilingual and, nowadays, multilingual lifestyle. With you, I started to understand the meaning with my mother tongue. And with you, I learned to love both Hungarian and Finnish deep in my heart. With more languages than one mother tongue, I am stronger and have more self-confidence than ever before. This happiness with languages is the most valuable thing individuals can give to each other. Your work, my friend, to give me a new language gives pleasure and joy forever. Mitä lämpimimmät kiitokseni siitä! / Thank you with all my love!
The contemporary world is full of different languages. These languages are everywhere: Signage, advertisements, popular culture, social media, streets, classrooms, offices, gossip – you name it. These languages are chaotic, messy, unexpected and cluttered. They are part of our everyday lives, whether you want it or not. They are, in fact, quite ordinary! Many of us, however, seem to simply ignore or disregard the messiness and ordinariness of these diverse languages. Because, they are – “SCRUFFY!” After all, who cares about the scruffy language, right? We somehow tend to take seriously ‘the standard’, ‘the official’ and ‘the formal’, while disregarding the most intimate part of our daily communications. Nonetheless, our book strives to show how developing an intimate relationship with ‘the unconventional’, ‘the scruffiness’, and ‘the messiness’ of our daily language practices may see us realize who we are indeed as human beings, as individuals, and as social members. This very messy side of language is, in fact, part of our identities, selves, natures, and characteristics.
Inspired by research in the debate of ‘sociolinguistics of globalization’ (Blommaert, 2010), we wanted to present a collection of research aimed at addressing this very messy, albeit ordinary, side of language. Since language can be understood from several different perspectives, as it is part of just about everything we do in daily life, this meant that our research would address several academic disciplines that include Linguistics, Sociology, Political Science and even Philosophy. However, these fields are often used to reinforce traditional ideas about ‘the standard’, ‘the official’, and ‘the normal’, which meant that we had a big task ahead of us as we were essentially suggesting, along with Blommaert (2010), that our traditional approaches of understanding the language of our daily lives were at times imprecise and in need of a makeover.
While rethinking our understanding of the language of our daily lives was indeed a challenge, although the data kind of spoke for itself in many ways, our biggest challenge was perhaps tying the interdisciplinary themes together as cohesive contributions to the discussion and debate of the ‘sociolinguistics of globalization’. Although we are often conveniently able to casually discuss the complexities of the debate using idealist and very general descriptions of culture, language, politics, and identity, it was challenging to present cutting-edge research that contributed to knowledge in such a way that it is worthy of publication. We hope we have achieved this aim with this project.
For more information about this book please see our website.
If you found this interesting, you might also like Aspiring to be Global by Shuang Gao.
The genesis of this book traces back to the beginning of the COVID pandemic, a time when the world ground to a halt, in the wake of the erosion of our familiar ways of human connection. It had become apparent that we needed innovative approaches to stay connected. This period marked a revolution in dialogues, witnessing diverse ways of thinking and languaging due to increased engagement with synchronous and asynchronous digitally mediated platforms such as Zoom and WhatsApp as well as social media communities, especially on X (formerly known as Twitter). However, the dialogues in the book extended beyond mere conversation, delving deeper into critical societal issues surrounding identity, language, and power dynamics. We believed this edited book could serve as an instrument for constructing a junction of dialogue, storytelling, critical listening, creativity, and consequently, fostering love, peace, and social change.
Channel View Publications and Multilingual Matters 