ABSTRACT
Centuries of integrative co-existence of diverse cultural and linguistic traditions and intersubjective meaning-making prompted Southern scholars to conceptualize the relations between semiotic resources and individual linguistic repertoires as, to use a current term, translingualism. This preceded and foreshadowed current interrogations of monoglossic conceptions of multilingualism as a fabrication of European modernity that misrepresents, to some extent, the nature and processes of human communication. Translingual communicative practices were characteristic of Southern lands prior to colonial activities of European states, before they suffered devaluation, marginalization and repression when colonizer languages were deployed as technologies of control and exploitation. Colonial policymakers restructured the relations of Southern peoples with each other and their lands through their language ideologies. Such colonizing attempts persist despite scholarly discourses about decolonization of language ideologies associated with European modernity. The neoliberal commodification of language has both enabled and constrained progress, and perpetuated divisive social, political, and cultural hierarchies. Translingual Sri Lanka is an instructive example of how people in the South have continued to draw from their Indigenous practices to absorb, change and accommodate colonizers’ languages, and have kept alive their translingual practices amidst the attempts of policymakers to privilege some languages over others. In this chapter, the authors focus primarily on the translingual tradition in pre-colonial and post-colonial South Asia, the region where they come from, and Sri Lanka in particular, to illustrate these decolonizing efforts.
