ABSTRACT
The focus of this chapter is decolonizing language in education as part of the broader project to decolonize applied linguistics. The applied linguistics that we envisage is one grounded in the experiences in colonial and postcolonial contexts and among marginalized and Indigenous communities in the geographical North. There is a concern that moves to replace European languages with students’ mother tongues may miss the point that the very notion of separate and nameable languages and either–or options between them is also in need of decolonization. Part of any project to decolonize applied linguistics is to step away from simple assumptions that replacing a former colonial language with an Indigenous one is in itself an emancipatory move. This view still operates from a northern framework that fails to understand the differences that the South brings to the fore. Other domains of applied linguistics, such as assessment and second language acquisition (SLA), are equally in need of decolonization through an understanding both of the roles they play in maintaining North–South inequalities and of the ways they can be rethought in terms of multilingual repertoires. SLA research, as it has slowly progressed from a remarkable narrowness of understanding of language diversity and context through the celebrated multilingual turn, nevertheless retains the acquisition of the same set of languages as targets of acquisition. This is not much of a turn, just a slight expansion that retains its Eurocentric multilingual roots. To engage with the deeply transformative potential of non-Eurocentric thinking, applied linguistics must cultivate a decolonial imagination that makes it possible to envisage an alternative reality and an alternative justice.
