Language gardens: returning to the poetics found in the linguisticdiversity of the land

The ways languages are framed in education shape attitudes and their roles within educational systems and practices. The term mother tongue invites critique for its gendered assumptions, often relegating multilingualism and language education to the undervalued domain of “women’s work.” Rooted in colonial histories, mother tongue has also been imposed on indigenous peoples as a bio-racial concept, erasing the ecological and cultural nuances that many Indigenous traditions imbue in the idea of language. Emerging terms like languages of first socialisation reframe these understandings. Across cultures, mother language seldom signifies a biological mother’s language. Instead, it often refers to languages of the land, spoken by the community and addressed through the more than human world, embodying both oral and written traditions. This paper weaves insights from three displaced Indigenous scholars, grounded in Blin, ChiShona, ChiNdau, Gaelic, and English. Drawing on Glissant’s poetics of diversity and permaculture frameworks, they offer a capacious vessel for intersectionality, language gardening, Indigenous knowledge, and a vision of abundance sustained through the reciprocal interplay of land, language, and life.