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.

摘要

我们通过越来越多地关注“南方”的语言学和社会学来构架多语言论，并承认非洲，美洲和亚洲的语言学家在人类活动，语言接触和随之而来的随着时间和空间变化的生态中所做出的早期贡献。最近，多语种的对话已向两个方向漂移。南方的对话已经与“反殖民理论”，“南方”理论，思想和认识论交织在一起。在这些中，“南部”被视为对地缘政治北部和南部边缘化，殖民化和纠缠的隐喻。受到广泛关注的北方辩论似乎集中在欧洲和北美最近的“重新觉醒”上，这些“回忆”错误地记住了南方的语言多样性经验。我们为本期文章提供了上下文背景，这些文章说明了多语种的才智和南方人民的语言公民身份。在这些语言中，南方多语言主义被揭示为现象，而不是通常用英语定义的现象。目的是提出一个相互利益的第三方向，以重新思考与南北双方的社区，纠缠和相互联系有关的社会想象。