ABSTRACT
The decolonial tide swept across the South African higher education landscape in 2015 and 2016 with student led protests. Apart from a call for fees to fall was a clarion call for the decolonisation of western knowledge including hegemonic languages. Focusing on the discipline of Linguistics in South African higher education, this chapter discusses attempts to decolonise a largely western canon. It provides practical examples from case studies that explore what it means be locally contextualised and globally relevant. The chapter will explore how the Linguistics community is navigating decoloniality in different spaces from workshops, curriculation spaces to the classroom. By doing so, it will consider what it means to learn about language and to learn through a language/s in South Africa and speak back to contestations of lived experiences as a theoretical. The theoretical lenses would draw on both global south and north scholars aligning to a hybrid approach to science. Specifically, it will draw on Legitimation Code Theory (LCT) (Maton, 2014), Freirean humanising pedagogy, African philosophy of Ubuntu, and African scholar Jank's (2010) critical literacy model.
