Certain people from certain places (the Global North) in certain languages (overwhelmingly English) produce the vast amount of knowledge about language, second language learning, education, language policy, and so on, and make universal claims to the applicability of that knowledge to the rest of the world. This is not just vaguely inappropriate knowledge, but rather knowledge that seeks to colonize. To oppose this requires several kinds of action that can bring a strong element of renewal to a discipline that all too often speaks only to itself, and largely in English. A central part of this is a process of decolonization of knowledge and practices, of language and theories of second language acquisition, of language policies, and language in education. We need to systematically and thoroughly deconstruct cultural hegemony in our own discipline and beyond and enlist more and more scholars from especially developing Third World societies to participate in the construction or re-invention of various cultural frameworks of research including both aboriginal, native cultural and intellectual resource and local specific conditions, needs and aspirations.
Decolonizing applied linguistics suggests first of all the need to decolonize ‘language’– or the way that language is framed in linguistics and applied linguistics – aspart of any reclamation project. We can identify several key northern ideas about language that are at best inappropriate when applied to southern contexts and at worst are downright harmful. These include a legacy of considering languages in terms of cognitive, literate systems rather than embodied and embedded cultural processes; a tendency to reify languages as if they exist outside of human relations; and a set of assumptions about languages as repositories of knowledge that once lost, lead simultaneously to the loss of shared forms of culture and knowledge. Language reclamation itself can be understood as a process of decolonization both in terms of giving new life to a language that has been cast aside by processes of coloniality and modernity, and in terms of changing the ways in which language is understood (resisting the colonial archives of linguistic modernity). Decolonization from this point of view involves community needs and goals rather than top-down assumptions about grammatical fluency, and above all, community ontologies of language.
PENNYCOOK, Alastair; MACONI, Sinfree. Innovations and Challenges in Applied Linguistics from the Global South. London and New York: Routledge, 2019, pp. 126-7.
After reading the excerpt, think about the possible relation between applied linguistics and language reclamation and choose the alternative that best associates them.
