Decoloniality and language scholarship – a critical intervention

Abstract In this article, we argue that the way decoloniality is invoked in sociolinguistics runs the risk of becoming a buzzword that is sometimes deployed with inadequate attention to how its conceptual and political premises need to be critically contextualized. We propose three interconnected challenges that critical applied/sociolinguists would need to address more seriously in order to avoid the depoliticization of the discussions around language and (de)coloniality: (1) the insistence on an incommensurable non-western alterity outside modernity; (2) the production of new binaries despite trying to undermine them; and (3) the decontextualization of the studied phenomena from on-the-ground situations in highly complex circumstances. We claim, on the one hand, that ‘Northern’ appropriation of decoloniality can offer self-deluding comfort that one is engaging in a politics of emancipation, yet all that is taking place is a form of withdrawal from the messiness of contemporary politics. On the other hand, this depoliticized decoloniality is also instrumentalized in the Global South to romanticize indigeneity/minorities and exploit them for insidious political purposes, generating recursive internal differentiations and inequality.