ABSTRACT
A focus on Southern multilingualisms requires not only the addition of contexts of Southern language use but also an extensive reworking of the frameworks through which languages are viewed. What languages are, and how they are used together, must be embedded in local social and cultural frameworks of reference. The relevance of sociolinguistic concepts such as multilingualism, or the idea that multilingualism could refer to the same thing in diverse contexts of communication, are revealed from this perspective as an absurdity. We need instead models that question the very foundations that underpin such linguistic simplifications, research that looks at different ways of understanding language, that takes on board Southern insights about language chains, communicative repertoires, and the need to pluralize not so much languages as the notion of language itself. We need more sophisticated models that capture as far as possible a wide array of contexts in the Global South, from urban to rural, formally educated to informal, and contemporary to historical. The challenge is for Southern socio- and applied linguistics to break free from assumptions about separate languages, endangered languages and language rights, and instead to move toward a more complex and appropriate understanding of language in the Global South, which may also liberate the Global North from its narrow and inadequate notions of language.
