ABSTRACT
Language has often been viewed as the quintessentially human facility, as ‘what makes us human’ and as what differentiates humans from other forms of life and the material world. In line with this view, language has largely been seen, within the northern episteme and within linguistic theory, as involving the capacity for rational thought and as representational. Recent theoretical developments focusing on the limitations of the symbolic and representational dimensions of language and seeking wider ways of understanding what language is and how it works provide strong challenges to this view. In this chapter we provide an overview of two main currents of thought on this matter. The first focuses on centring the materiality of language itself as a way of showing up limitations of the symbolic and representational views, while the second focuses on decentring the human by exploring post-humanism and new materialism. Each of these positions the concept of ontology as being central. While the language materiality approach explores language ontologies, the post-human and new materialist approaches explore the position of language and the discursive in relation to other ontological types, like other than human beings, substances, material objects and natural phenomena. We outline these differences as well as other key concepts and provide examples of research across these fields.
