Introduction

According to Reference LiLi Wei (2018), the notion of ‘translanguaging’ is useful in many respects. While languaging emphasizes that language is always an activity, a process, or a practice, the trans prefix suggests a move away from traditional collectivist conceptions of ‘language’ as a countable object. Even though languaging points towards an activity or a process, paradoxically, in order to demonstrate that languaging has taken place one has to analyze languaging as product, as a sequence, and as a series of reiterations of products. ‘Translanguaging’ points towards a type of linguistics that recognizes languaging as drawing on idiolectal resources: multilingual, multimodal, multisemiotic, and multisensory. While the idiolect has been chosen as a valid concept in the works of contemporary linguists, rejecting the fixed-code notion of ‘languages’ (e.g. Reference Sabino, Makoni, Kaiper-Maquez and VeritySabino, 2021), it is nevertheless theoretically problematic in various ways (Reference HarrisHarris, 1998, pp. 48–50). In this chapter we wish to underline the need for a lay-oriented approach to languaging and translanguaging, while at the same time gauging the explanatory power of the sign and the related concept of sign-making in communication (rather than linguistic) theory.

A lay-oriented view renders it conceptually feasible to resolve the contradiction that there is no agreement among laypeople as to what counts as a manifestation of ‘language’. Examples where laypeople might disagree concerning ‘linguistic’ status would be interjections (uh-oh, whoa!, etc.) as well as activities in connection with dancing, singing, music, etc. It is a contradiction because language scientists are reflexive language users like any other lay speakers; however, the former need to define language, that is, limit the range of how the word is meaningfully applied if linguistics is to be a science. But even if linguists no longer claim scientific status for their particular brand of linguistics (e.g. sociolinguistics), the question of what linguistics is (if not a science) remains: the issue of expertise cannot be avoided. Therefore, qua experts, linguists have to declare that their reflections about language are qualitatively different from lay people’s. Even though we are arguing for a lay-oriented linguistic scholarship, we are aware that an ‘abstract term may coopt or abstract a lay term and supply it with a technical term’ (Reference Hutton, Antia and MakoniHutton, 2022, p. 18). There is in fact no substantial interest on the part of linguists in the parasitic relationship between lay linguistics and academic linguistics (Reference HarrisHarris, 1998). There are very few studies we are aware of which have systematically analysed how the linguistic metalanguage (including translanguaging) circulates across different subdisciplines and in different academic contexts, and what meanings the terms acquire in those subdisciplines and contexts. For example, even though there is a substantial body of scholarship on translanguaging, we know very little about the uptake of the concept in publications written in languages other than English – for example, in Arabic, Swahili, Afrikaans, Portuguese – analysing those languages.

We explicitly retain the trans prefix – however, not merely to transcend the language systems and structures of the mainstream paradigm (i.e. ‘language’ as countable) but to question the very nature of ‘language’ as mass’ (‘translanguage’), as recently argued by Reference Pennycook and MakoniPennycook & Makoni (2020). By the grammatical term ‘mass’ we refer to words that indicate a relatively undifferentiated substance (as in ‘Please use simple, concise language’) as opposed to words that indicate discrete, countable objects (as in ‘I speak three languages’). Adopting a southern perspective, we would like to suggest that ‘language’ (mass) may possess multiple natures (Reference Hauck and HeurichHauck & Heurich, 2018), that is, we move from a critique of ‘languages’ as socially constructed fixed-codes, or ‘hermetically sealed entities’ (Reference Makoni, Makoni, Smitherman, Ball and SpearsMakoni, 2003, p. 139) to a critique of ‘language’ as having a universal ontology. On the latter issue, Reference De Souza, Antia and MakoniLynn M. de Souza (2022, p. xiv) remarks that in southern sociolinguistics ‘what is significant in the move to the local is the importance given to the questioning of what was previously understood as linguistics, in the singular, and sociolinguistics as the application of this singular in varied local contexts’. He goes on to say that ‘encouragingly, what is being questioned in recent decolonial and southern theories is the previously naturalized singularity of linguistic knowledge’.

In order to explore this idea of an ontological plurality of ‘language’ (mass), we argue that linguistics needs to be lay-oriented, whereby ‘lay-orientedness’ is to be construed in two ways: (i) it takes seriously the most diverse cultural and individual views on what constitutes ‘language’ (and ‘languages’), that is, it moves beyond northern folklinguistic categories and conceptions to include the Global South as a rich field of radically different lay metalinguistic discourses. It accepts that the same individual may be able to entertain a number of potentially irreconcilable notions concerning the ontologies of language. The same individual may draw upon different social and cultural experiences, i.e., individuals will be subject to a notion of language ontology originating in formal language instruction and shaped by Western education (Reference Hall and WicaksonoHall & Wicaksono, 2020), while at the same time remaining sensitive to language ontologies from the Global South, predominating in informal contexts. Reference Hall and WicaksonoHall & Wicaksono (2020) enumerate a wide range of ontologies, among which are ‘English as a Lingua Franca’, ‘communicative assemblage’, and ‘English as an Additional Language’. While all these ontologies are helpful, they are all restricted to formal northern ontologies and are silent on numerous lay linguistic experiences from the Global South. Lay orientations under (i) entail speaking with metaphors from land, ocean, and, at times, both land and ocean (Reference NeimanisNeimanis, 2017; Reference Steinberg and PetersSteinberg & Peters, 2015). Thus, ‘water epistemology’, or ‘wet epistemology’ and ‘liquid materiality’ (Reference Steinberg and PetersSteinberg & Peters, 2015) signal a marked shift from thinking about language as made up of a single rootedness of native speakers to enable us to pay attention to that of a multilingual migrant (Reference GuldinGuildin, 2020). We argue that ‘water’ and ‘sea-ness’ should not only constitute the background against which notions of language are to be framed, but should constitute analytical heuristics of thinking through language. An example of a metaphor which is ‘in between’ land and the sea, which brings about the collapse of binary distinctions between land and sea, is the mangrove. The mangrove is a type of ‘artistic thinking’ that draws our attention to ‘being-in-the world’ (Reference DeumertDeumert, 2019). Inspired by Reference Deleuze and GuattariDeleuze & Guattari (1980), Deumert advocates for a ‘rhizomatic interpretation’ of the mangrove. She argues that thinking with the rhizome enables us to capture the multiplicities, assemblages, and interconnections that shape the social world (Reference Severo, Makoni, Cunningham and HallSevero & Makoni, 2021b, p. 24). In urban areas, in turn, this means, among other things, viewing language through ‘the city pipelines’ and ‘entangled electric cables’ (Reference Beck, Beck and WittmanBeck, 2004; Reference Amin and ThriftAmin & Thrift, 2017; Reference BouBou Ayash, 2019). The communicative practices can be extended to inanimate objects: for example, the uses of carved pot lids from the lower Congo area which Reference Beck, Beck and WittmanBeck (2004) regards as ‘speaking objects’. Communication from such a perspective is not restricted to human beings but also takes place between inanimate objects. A lay-oriented approach to language renders it conceptually feasible to imagine translanguaging between inanimate objects and between human beings and inanimate objects, or between human beings and other species (Reference DescolaDescola, 2013). Of course, lay speakers regarding all of these types of interactions as examples involving ‘language’, will not necessarily regard the communication between human beings, between human beings and non-human beings, between human beings and inanimate beings, or between inanimate beings and other inanimate beings as having the same ontological nature.

(ii) The second lay-orientated conception theorizes language and communication in ways lay people might not express themselves, while allowing them at the same time to recognize their own communicational practices in the ‘lay-oriented’ theory, irrespective of cultural differences (Reference HarrisHarris, 1996; Reference PabléPablé, 2019a). The conception under (i) is the one promoted by a southern linguistics: ‘language’ is whatever people construe it to be. It may include music as well as dance and it may include speech practices which, from a northern standpoint, are regarded as ‘non-linguistic’ (Reference Severo, Makoni, Makoni, Kaiper-Marquez and VeritySevero & Makoni, 2021a). The conception under (ii) is arguably the domain of an integrational communication theory as developed by Roy Harris (Reference PabléPablé, 2019b): communication is a matter of integrating, by means of signs of one’s own making, two or more activities which would otherwise remain unintegrated. On that view, ‘languaging’ is not a separate or separable activity – pace translanguaging scholarship – for what counts as ‘languaging’ is not something that can be predetermined. In other words, laypeople experience communication as an integrated continuum, not as compartmentalized activities (Reference HarrisHarris, 1996), which in the Global South may include, dance, music, gesture, body movements, dress, and inscriptions on textiles.

To some degree, an integrational theory of communication resembles an Afro-centric cultural theory. Afro-centricity, according to Reference MolefiMolefi (1998, Reference Molefi2021) and Reference Monteiro-FerreiraMonteiro-Ferreira (2015), adopts a holistic orientation towards analysing myths, spiritualities, and cosmologies in African history. Afro-centricity situates African scholarship within African experiences. Afro-centricity, using integrational communication theory, seeks a clear ‘rupture’ from orthodox approaches to linguistic analysis (Reference Makoni and PabléMakoni & Pablé, 2022). The rupture is analogous to Mignolo’s ‘epistemic delinking’ (Reference MignoloMignolo, 2007, p. 450), although there is a subtle difference between Afro-centricity and decoloniality as articulated by Mignolo. The latter traces the emergence of modernity 500 years ago to European encounters with the rest of the world. Reference AsanteAsante (1998), on the other hand, prefers to view Africa as having a longer history, one predating the colonial encounters, which in his view constitute a relatively short part of Africa’s long historical trajectory. We are, therefore, proposing a lay-oriented approach to communication grounded in integrational semiology and Afro-centricity.

Trans-‘languages’ and Trans-‘language’

The analyst adopting a translanguaging framework assumes a third-person perspective in their understanding of how speakers (unconsciously) shift between linguistic boundaries. It is a framework meant to provide evidence that theorizing communication on the basis of Saussurean fixed-codes (i.e., entities referred to as ‘languages’) leads to an empirical dead end. The objects of the translingualist’s critique are languages as count and the phenomena that presuppose them are concepts such as bilingualism, multilingualism, code-switching, etc. However, the languaging in the translanguaging scholarship is still considered as being done through linguistic signs with a determinate form, that is, through the lens of what Reference HarrisHarris (1996) has called a ‘segregational’ linguistics. A third-person perspective implies that the signs that the translingual analyst identifies are the same signs that were made by the sign-makers themselves. Thus, the signs identified may not be classified as signs of a particular language, but by declaring them as ‘languageless’ one still has to take language (count) as one’s reference point. That is the logical conclusion of treating signs as determinate, as being accessible retrospectively in their original form. So while the translanguaging project is a critique of the mainstream view of language, it has not radically broken with the traditional conception of the sign commonly adopted in linguistics; it is not unlike other contemporary critiques of the mainstream (Reference OrmanOrman, 2013). In this view, there is no discernible rupture between translanguaging and mainstream linguistics; if anything, translanguaging reinforces mainstream linguistics because it is grounded in the same segregational assumptions about the sign (Reference Orman and PabléOrman & Pablé, 2016; Reference YanYan, 2022). This traditional view treats the sign as having an objectively identifiable ontology in its material manifestation, and as having a metaphysical existence in the form of an abstraction. These two premises are implied when signs are identified and described as particular signs that somebody uttered on a particular occasion. Translingualists, we are claiming here, subscribe to some notion of language (count) as a direct consequence of the semiological stance they adopt, and hence work within a northern theoretical tradition.

From our reading of the vast and rapidly expanding scholarship, translanguaging does not question the ontological existence of the notion of ‘language’ (count). It assumes that languages exist (at least at a theoretical level). If languages did not exist, the prefix -trans and the suffix -ing would be meaningless because you cannot transcend that which does not exist. We orient to translanguaging animated by two distinct traditions of scholarship, which in their separate ways are sceptical about the ontological existence of languages. Integrational linguistics (Reference HarrisHarris, 1998), and the French Africanist scholarship as represented by the work of the anthropologist Reference Amselle, Diagne and AmselleJean-Loup Amselle (2020) and the sociolinguist Reference Canut, Makoni, Kaiper-Marquez and MokwenaCecil Canut (2022), which in their very different ways coalesce around their rejection of languages as having a first-order ontology. The integrationist position about the ontology of language is articulated by Reference LoveLove (2017), when he writes that languages do not constitute first-order activities, but are ‘second-order’ abstractions, that is, they are subsequent, rather than prior to the linguistic activities referred to as ‘languaging’. From an integrational point of view, languages are mythical (Reference HarrisHarris, 1981), but at the same time they are widely accepted lay linguistic terms. Thus, languages (count) need to be accommodated within a lay-oriented view of language, while making it clear that they are not necessarily universal lay linguistic notions. As part of a lay-oriented theory of language in Harris’ sense, however, languages (count) do not fulfil an explanatory role. This is so because an integrational theory treats theorizing language as inseparable from theorizing communication, which it construes as activities integrated by means of contextualized signs created by the respective sign-makers as the contingency of the situation requires. In other words, for the integrationist, ‘language’ is not a type of activity that can be delineated based on a universal set of criteria. Consequently, arguments about the design features of language (e.g., discreteness, language as a system, linguistic form), which one encounters in mainstream linguistic textbooks, are difficult to accommodate in the framework we are developing here. The integrationist starts with a notion of ‘communication’ of which language is a part. In mainstream linguistics, the theoretical concept of ‘languages’ enables the professional linguist to focus on linguistic/verbal communication as something sui generis. In turn, from an integrational point of view, there are no ‘linguistic’ signs reserved for ‘linguistic’ communication. The integrational conception treats the sign as that which facilitates the integration of one activity with another, and at the same time as the result of that integration. If we were to accept ‘languages’ as a constitutive part of first-order communication, what would be the basis on which to decide which activities are ‘linguistic’ and which ones are not? Are the activities of speaking, listening, thinking, signing, seeing, feeling, moving all relevant to the notion of ‘language’ (count)? As a theoretical construct, ‘languages’ only make sense as abstract systems of signs which make linguistic communication possible at all. For Saussure, ‘the language’ (count) was the invisible part in the communication process. In lay terms, however, the language is identified materially: the sounds made and the sounds heard, that is, it is identified with particular activities (not with an abstract linguistic system as construed by Saussure). Thus, languages do not explain first-order communication itself. They are rather presupposed in order for communication to occur. Integrationists, in turn, take a first-person view of the sign: no two individuals make the same sign(s) at any time because they each integrate certain activities from the only perspective they have, namely, their own. It follows that neither do the linguistic theorist and analyst have a perspective that transcends their own. Signs are only ontologically determinate, or provisionally determinate, from the sign-maker’s point of view. The sign-maker will be anyone making sense of a particular episode of communication, taking on such roles as speaker, hearer, auditor, analyst, etc. The meaning of the sign is its integrational function as made by its sign-maker here-and-now.

In spite of the powerful and well-known arguments by Reference wa Thiong’oNgugi wa Thiong’o (1986), Reference PrahPrah (2018), and also Reference MakalelaMakalela (2016) on ubuntu translanguaging, there is no general agreement in African scholarship about the existence of languages (count). One of the first African scholars and activists to bring to the fore issues about African languages was Ngugi wa Thiong’o, who, in his famous book Decolonizing the Mind (Reference wa Thiong’o1986), argues for a return to the use of Gikuyu, raising issues about the concept of ‘mother tongue’ and the relevance of such metalanguage in African scholarship. As Reference Amselle, Diagne and AmselleAmselle (2020, p. 53) notes: ‘Indeed, one may well wonder whether this abandonment of English by wa Thiong’o did not lead him to fetishize language and to see it as the receptacle of an innate and somewhat romantic cultural harmony, which in fact corresponds to the polysemy of the concept of ‘mother tongue’ seen as a native, original, even Adamic language’. According to Amselle, wa Thiong’o overlooks the degree to which the invention of indigenous African languages was founded on an analytical colonial grid. Wa Thiong’o is not the only African scholar to have argued for a return to the use of a mother tongue. On the Francophone side, Boubacar Boris Diop resolved to write in Wolof, Senegal’s second official language (Reference Amselle, Diagne and AmselleAmselle, 2020).

A neglected debate in both African scholarship and international sociolinguistics concerns the politics of metalanguage (Reference Hutton, Antia and MakoniHutton, 2022), to which discussions about translanguaging contribute in important ways (Reference YanYan, 2022). Reference Hutton, Antia and MakoniHutton (2022) argues that sociolinguistics is drawn in two different directions: a universalist commitment to Romantic authenticity and postmodern fluidity. Romanticism values authenticity, trueness to type, spontaneity, minimal reflexivity, lack of artifice, self-expression, and self-determination. This is expressed in a metalanguage which rejects prescriptivism, opts for vernacularism, and rejects elitism. The postmodern, on the other hand, prefers process to product and replaces multilingualism with superdiversity.

Reference Amselle, Diagne and AmselleAmselle (2020) comments as follows: ‘Regarding language(s), I will start by paraphrasing Sartre and stating that non-existence precedes existence, that the non-existence of languages, like that of cultures and traditions, precedes their existence. It is not because languages exist that we speak them, but, on the contrary, it is because they are spoken that they exist. People ‘speak the languages they speak’ (Reference Amselle, Diagne and AmselleAmselle, 2020, p. 50). If we, qua linguistic theorists, accept the idea that languages do not exist, we cannot at the same time argue that an individual speaks French, English, Swahili, Bambara, etc. According to Reference Amselle, Diagne and AmselleAmselle (2020, p. 52), an individual draws from a ‘linguistic corpus’ at his or her disposal, which is not a priori delimited and necessarily includes other languages. A second strand within non-segregational linguistic thought has been popularized by Reference Canut, Makoni, Kaiper-Marquez and MokwenaCanut (2022), drawing on Reference Makoni, Nuttall and CotzeeMakoni (1998), Reference Makoni and PennycookMakoni & Pennycook (2007), Reference Pennycook and MakoniPennycook & Makoni (2020), who argues for a ‘sociolinguistics of practices from a perspective based on language heterogeneity without any reference to the notion of ‘langue’ and all its derivatives like system, dialect, code, and so on’ (Reference Canut, Makoni, Kaiper-Marquez and MokwenaCanut 2022, p. 46), including languaging or translanguaging. The integrational linguist will very much agree with Amselle and Canut when it comes to the insight that languages are the products of communication, not its prerequisites (Reference HarrisHarris, 1998), but will stop short of endorsing the idea of an individual emergent ‘linguistic corpus’ created during a communicative event. For the integrationist, communication requires that a sign-maker integrates the here-and-now (present experience) with the (remembered) past and the (anticipated) future. Communicating, on this view, is thus a creative semiological act whose limits are defined exclusively by three parameters, namely the present circumstances, the sign-maker’s perception of established macrosocial practices, and by biomechanical constraints (Reference HarrisHarris, 1998, 29). The notion of a ‘linguistic corpus’ (or an ‘idiolect’ for that matter) is seen as problematic because it invokes a semiological given of some sort: that is, some linguistic signs making up the corpus. However, both the Afro-centric linguist and the integrationist subscribe to the notion that ‘languages’ do not exist and that, therefore, translanguaging is not conceptually feasible as a universal phenomenon or as a substitute for communication (or sign-making). For this very reason, translanguaging needs to be subjected to the idea of ‘trans-language’ (mass) in the context of a southern linguistic theory. The argument about the non-existence of languages has vast implications for some of the important controversies within African scholarship. However, we wish to argue that the rejection of ‘language’ (mass) as a universal (as construed in a Eurocentric ‘segregational’ linguistics) is even more significant since it requires a paradigm shift of even grander magnitude.

Ubuntu Translanguaging

The idea of translanguaging assumes that ‘languages’ pre-exist communicative practices and that in linguistic communication we are moving across language boundaries. Nevertheless, we wish to refer here to the idea of ‘ubuntu translanguaging’. While we may be sceptical of ubuntu translanguaging because of the way it ‘fetishizes’ notions about language (count) in Africa and the Global South, the main strength of the concept lies in the philosophical meanings of ubuntu and not so much in translanguaging. Ubuntu provides opportunities for trans-individuality (Reference Cornell and van MarleCornell & van Marle, 2015). Any serious discussion about translanguaging in the Global South has to reflect an awareness of the extensive scholarship about language not published in Western journals of language and linguistics. Ubuntu is an African principle which encapsulates what it means to be human and how all social relationships are embedded in an ethical entanglement which begins at birth (Reference Cornell and van MarleCornell & van Marle, 2015, p. 2). Ubuntu seems to be framed as a form of ontology, but Cornell and Marie point out that it is not reducible to ontology, epistemology, or to an ethical value system. In fact, ubuntu is all of the three. Distinctions which are made in Euro-American philosophy are not equivalent to those in African philosophy. Ubuntu is a philosophy on how human relationships are intertwined in a ‘web of ethical relations’ (Reference Cornell and van MarleCornell & van Marle, 2015, p. 7). Ubuntu translanguaging is compatible with the ontological notion of language as mass and not language as count. It also draws attention to language users, language knowers, and diverts attention away from language as isolated ontological entities (language as count).

Language (Mass) in a Southern Perspective

Southern linguistic theory takes a more lay-oriented approach to linguistic phenomenologies. What lay people believe about language, languages, and communication ought to be at the centre of the researcher’s attention. In this way, it is possible to gain an insight into Southern epistemologies rather than applying northern linguistic grids to the understanding of languaging. Languaging, we would like to claim, is of a personal experiential nature – it is something that every languaging agent experiences from their own perspective while engaging in communication. The analyst adopting a third-person perspective, therefore, is another interpreter, or sign-maker, whose experience is entirely his/her own. On this view, linguistic analysis is itself semiological creation, and not a faithful disinterested rendering (Reference DunckerDuncker, 2022).

Decolonizing and southernizing scholarship highlights the dangers of universalizing received categories and notions about ‘language’ foreign to the Global South. Following Khubchadnai, Reference De Souza, Antia and MakoniLynn Mario de Souza (2022) argues that ‘fuzziness’ and ‘indeterminacy’ are central to language analysis. For language users in plurilingual and rapidly shifting and changing contexts the focus should be on what individuals are able to accomplish or are seeking to accomplish, drawing in part on language complemented by other semiotic resources and taking advantage of the interpersonal relations between speakers. It is important to work on synergy and serendipity. Synergy refers to mutual interests, serendipity is openness to and acceptance of unforeseen aspects of each interaction (Reference De Souza, Antia and Makonide Souza, 2022).

As Reference Pennycook and MakoniPennycook & Makoni (2020) have argued, a southern perspective on languaging needs to insist that the concept of ‘language’ (mass) is a pluralistic one, i.e., its ontological nature varies with the perspective of each languaging agent along the aforementioned three parameters of communication established by Reference HarrisHarris (1984, Reference Harris1996) constraining the possibilities of sign-making: macrosocial factors (how human beings relate to the practices established in the community), biomechanical factors (how human beings are mentally, physiologically, and physically conditioned), and circumstantial factors (how human beings are conditioned by the specifics of the situation). Therefore, the question ‘What is language?’ is at the forefront of southern linguistic theory: it is a question that varies radically between radically different cultures, but it ultimately depends on the individual’s personal communicational biography. Someone in the Global South may have a northern conception of what ‘language’ is (e.g. through the educational system), while someone in the Global North may entertain conceptions of ‘language’ more closely related to a southern pluralistic view (Reference Pablé, Makoni, Kaiper-Marquez and VerityPablé, 2021).

We would like to propose that ‘language’ is indeed a human universal, but not in the sense that it can be defined in any scientific way. Rather, any human being has personal linguistic experience which resulted from past communicational activities and which makes present communicational activities possible. When human beings engage in activities, they ‘do’ something. Some of their activities, what is commonly referred to as linguistic or communicative behaviour, are observable by others. However, how humans experience their own and other people’s behaviour is not accessible to others the way it is to themselves. In this sense ‘language’ (and the question of what language ‘is’) must be deeply tied to one’s personal experience. Of course, this personal experience is talked about and is, therefore, macrosocially constrained: the community develops linguistic beliefs that members are continually exposed to and that come to be regarded as shared beliefs. It is those beliefs that a southern (lay-oriented) linguistics will turn to, without losing sight of the fact that behind any (expressed) linguistic metadiscourse there is always an individual who has accumulated (unexpressed) communicational experiences which defy third-person generalizations. Southern linguists taking a lay-oriented approach to ‘language’ thus ought to explore both the language ideologies of the various communities and the individuals’ deeply personal communicational biographies. The guiding principle in a southern linguistics, in any case, should not be that of northern empirical linguistics. Neither should it be aligned to a northern folklinguistics (e.g. Reference Niedzielski and PrestonNiedzielski & Preston, 1999), since the latter still acknowledges the primacy of orthodox (i.e. academic) linguistics. The challenge to sociolinguistics and translanguaging is fundamental. From a southern perspective, the discourses of translanguaging are untrustworthy because they are imposed on the Global South via disciplinary formations created and sustained from the Global North. As Reference MakoniMakoni (2011, 681) remarks: ‘European languages provided the analytical apparatus and generative grid which African grammars had to fit in’. The entire enterprise thus becomes question-begging.

Is it Possible for Translanguaging to be Decolonial?

Whether translanguaging is decolonial or not depends to a large degree on what decoloniality means within the geopolitical context. The meaning of decoloniality is heterogeneous and varies depending on the heterogeneity and diversity of colonial practices (Reference TlostanovaTlostanova, 2014, p. 64). For example, decoloniality in Latin America means different things from what it means within African contexts. In African contexts, decoloniality itself may also vary depending on whether we are dealing with contexts of settler colonialism such as Southern Africa, or colonialism in non-settler contexts (Reference TaiwoTaiwo, 2019). In Europe the nature of decoloniality may vary depending on the regional-economic distinctions drawn, for example, between regions which are on the periphery of Europe (Spain, Portugal, Greece) and those in the centre (Germany, France and the United Kingdom). Decoloniality is also relevant to contexts which have little or no colonial historical background, such as the dissolution of the socialist republics of the former USSR, which could be seen as a partial project of decolonization. Reference Deumert and MakoniDeumert & Makoni (2023) note that any efforts to deal with issues about decoloniality in contexts of non-colonial histories have to address issues about race, one such context being Eastern Europe (Reference Karkov and ValivcharskaKarkov & Valiavcharska, 2018). They suggest that ‘Eastern Europeans are racialized as inferior and uncivilized’, that is, they are not treated as white, but as grey and thus suffer from frustrated whiteness. So if translanguaging is to be utilized within this region it has to address the complicated relationship between translanguaging and ‘frustrated whiteness’. Translanguaging, if applied to an Eastern European context, is likely to be used to analyse the nature of interaction between people who may be categorized as belonging to different ethnic groups. It is this complex relationship between translanguaging and ethnicity which has not been systematically studied because most studies have tended to concentrate on contexts in which there are relatively large numbers of different racial groups, such as the United States, Brazil, South Africa (Reference Alim, Reyes, Kroskrity, Alim, Reyes and KroskrityAlim, Reyes, & Kroskrity, 2020).

Conclusion

In expanding questions of disciplinary metalanguage, Southern Theory may play a critical role in the disambiguation of the foundations of sociolinguistics (Reference Hutton, Antia and MakoniHutton, 2022), and hence also of applied linguistics (Reference Pennycook and MakoniPennycook & Makoni, 2020). Integrational linguistics has played an important role in raising questions about the metalanguage of linguistics in general (Reference HarrisHarris, 1996, Reference Harris1998). In contexts in which it is inspired by an integrational critique, southern linguistic theory becomes a powerful tool for demythologizing linguistic theory, including concepts like translanguaging. In fact, Reference HarrisHarris (2011) has insisted that questions, including questions about the metalanguage of a discipline, never come to an end (i.e., there are no ‘ultimate’ questions), nor are they languageless. In this piece, for instance, we are asking questions in English. As Reference HarrisHarris (2011, p. 93) astutely remarks: ‘Are these, then, questions which have their equivalents in all known languages?’ This leads us to acknowledge the difficulty inherent in the notion of a ‘universal question’. At the same time, we have argued, following Harris, that an integrational theory of language and communication is ‘lay-oriented’, and thus in principle ought to make communicational sense to anyone reflecting on his/her own linguistic experience. But of course, we are aware that most of the integrationist literature is written in English, and this, in turn, poses a limit to sense-making of a macrosocial order: one cannot raise questions and/or provide answers in a language one doesn’t speak. The translanguaging scholar would object that asking questions is part of the translanguaging game – no specific language is needed to ask questions. While the integrationist rejects the existence of languages as scientifically describable objects, this does not mean that asking questions is not sign-specific (or what lay linguistic usage would indeed term ‘language-specific’) from the sign-maker’s point of view. The signs I make when I ask a question will be signs that I recognize as specific signs, and moreover must be signs that other sign-makers can relate to on the basis of their personal linguistic experience. If I ask questions that others need to ponder about or provide answers to, the satisfaction of the latter condition seems essential. Thus, to say that in order to answer a question posed in English you need to ‘know English’, does not mean that there must be something that English ‘is’, ontologically speaking. The signs are personal and never ‘shared’, but at the same time a speaker must assume that the signs made are identifiable to others (although ‘they’ will make different signs from ‘me’). Whether they are identified as signs of a particular language or not may not be of primary concern to the sign-makers themselves. Signs are determinate from the sign-maker’s point of view but are ‘radically indeterminate’ in the sense that semiological sameness or identity is an impossibility. The metalanguage used in the translanguaging scholarship is identified with ‘a language’ (English, German, French, etc.), which is a macrosocial constraint having to do with scientific conventions. We cannot get around the lay linguistic notion of ‘a language’, and we need not to (as long as we realize that at the theoretical level there is no justification for resorting to the concept of ‘languages’ in order to explain human sign-making).

It is significant that southern linguistic theory questions the notion of ‘language’ (mass) as a human universal, though it does so (necessarily) in ‘a language’. But if there is no human universal agreement on what constitutes ‘language’ (mass), can we take it for granted that any human community can ask questions? Reference HarrisHarris (2012, p. 83) seems to have thought so: ‘the human being is a creature that can ask questions’. To this he adds that ‘unless we understand this latter capacity, we understand very little about human nature’. It will be the task of a southern linguistics to investigate the integrationist claim that there are human communicational universals (e.g. question-answer, initiative-sequel, circumstantial/biomechanical/macrosocial parameters, etc.). A decolonial integrational linguistics (Reference Makoni and PabléMakoni & Pablé, 2022), which combines insights from integrationism and southern theory, fully commits to the lay-orientation of the first kind, which entails the acknowledgement that human conceptions of ‘language’ (mass and count) are far more diverse and complex than the scientific metalanguage of orthodox linguistic theory might suggest. As far as the lay-orientation of the second kind is concerned, there is a need to further explore questions in the philosophy of language and linguistics, as initiated by Reference Makoni, Kaiper-Marquez and VerityMakoni, Kaiper-Marquez, & Verity (2021).

The primary objective of this chapter was to develop a lay-orientation towards translanguaging. The lay-orientation is grounded in an innovative and novel integrationist approach to translanguaging. This approach could be expanded by using the notion of ‘precarity’. In sociology, precarity, when used in the context of both the Global North and Global South, refers to individuals and communities who do not have secure employment or predictable life conditions. While the idea of precarity may create uncertainty and produce a heightened sense of insecurity in social contexts, when we use the term to frame lay-orientations towards translanguaging in an integrationist framework, precarity carries positive meanings. It creates opportunities for flexibility, creativity, innovation, latitude, and room for complex manoeuvres, all of which are necessary in complicated contexts of plurilanguage usage. Thus ‘precarity’ not primarily in the sense of linguistic or semiological insecurity, but rather in the sense that human communication requires sign-making proficiency in the face of ever new contextualizations.

The chapters in this volume edited by Sender Dovchin, Rhonda Oliver, and Li Wei center on the idea that the recombinant, mutating, hybrid, and multivocal communicative practices that take place in complex sociolinguistic scenarios – in short, translanguaging practices – are not reduced to “playfulness.” Dovchin, Oliver, and Li cite some empirical findings from studies on playfulness in current translingual research. In their words, some works point that the

Yet Dovchin, Oliver, and Li hasten to add that to assume that translingual practice amounts to only playing with language is a “rather romanticized representation of translingualism”. Indeed, they note that one of the critiques levelled at the romanticized view is that it may celebrate playfulness despite the “precarious conditions of life” of language users described in these studies (but see Reference DeumertDeumert, 2022; Reference DovchinDovchin, 2021; Reference Dovchin and DrydenDovchin & Dryden, 2022; Reference SultanaSultana, 2022).

To address this critique, the chapters in this book carry out an interesting reading of precarity in terms of ontology – for example, Reference ButlerButler’s (2004) position on the vulnerability of our bonds and our condition as beings in interdependence – and sociology – e.g. precarity as an umbrella term referring to the fact that “much of the world’s population lacks stable work and steady incomes”(Reference Kasmir and SteinKasmir, 2018), which has sparked various forms of mobilizations and responses by the “precariat” (Reference MillarMillar, 2017). The chapters in this volume mount a wide range of theoretical and empirical evidence for discussing contextual problems such as “translingual precarity” (Chapter 2), “precarious assemblages” (Chapter 4), and the precarity of life of undocumented migrants (Chapter 8) or youth in rural Uganda and an Indian slum (Chapter 6). Fundamentally, this volume draws strongly on ethnography and participant observation. This yields a situated understanding of how forms of precarity and playfulness emerge contextually. Perhaps one of the strongest impressions I had while reading the chapters was that we cannot reduce either the communicative practices (e.g., translanguaging, critical pedagogy, translation, art) or the contexts (e.g., peripheral sites in urban centers or rural areas) where subjects in precarious conditions dwell to totalizing and essential definitions based on universal, necessary, and sufficient conditions – something that one might do using a single theoretical “model” (usually produced or led by researchers situated in well-funded research centers in the Global North).

I have commented above on the density and empirical nuance given to communicative practices and peripheries in this volume because this is my goal in this Afterword: to think that situated and contextual critique is the best way to avoid adhering to “big” theoretical models. The problem here, it is worth saying, is not the idea of a theoretical model, much less its size. Benedict Reference AndersonAnderson’s (1983) “imagined community” and Reference SaussureSaussure’s (1959 [1916]) “la langue” are big theoretical models – and the amazing record of critique they invited, especially about their generalizing propensities, has produced vibrant knowledge about such notions as “community,” “temporality,” “nationalism,” and “language” (see, e.g., Reference AghaAgha, 2007; Reference MahmoodMahmood, 2009; Reference Silverstein and KroskritySilverstein, 2000).

The problem with a big theoretical model is that usually the adjective “big” indexes theoretical work produced in power dynamics that erase “small” interlocutions, citational chains, and aspirations – small here meaning that they are produced by those in the Global South (Reference SantosSantos, 2007), people who are seen as “informants” or “facilitators” of fieldwork rather than interlocutors or authors (Reference GoldsteinGoldstein, 2019). As Bolivian sociologist Reference CusicanquiSilvia Rivera Cusicanqui (2019) discusses, in big theoretical models, authors situated south of the border are often appropriated without proper credit. And when they are recognized as “authors,” their ideas are made to fit Anglo-Eurocentric epistemic canons. Cusicanqui elaborates on appropriations of her own work by Latin American scholars in North America – which points to layers of internal colonialism that are replicated in different geographical sites. One of the effects of these unequal dynamics for those of us in peripheral centers of knowledge production is that most of the time what we produce counts as “input” rather than “theory” or “analysis.” In Reference CusicanquiCusicanqui’s (2019, p. 114) own words: through “the game of who cites whom, hierarchies are structured, and we end up having to consume, in a regurgitated form, the very ideas regarding decolonization that we indigenous people and intellectuals of Bolivia, Peru, and Ecuador have produced independently.”

A personal example of this interactional production of inequality will certainly contribute to the exercise of critique that I intend to do here. Together with other colleagues, I am the editor of an applied linguistics journal in Brazil. Like almost all Brazilian journals, Trabalhos em Linguística Aplicada is entirely open access – and what makes access to articles free is the fact that journals in Brazil rely on the (increasingly precarious) public structure of universities and on the work of professors, who accumulate the functions of editors, without additional pay. Sometimes, a small team of graduate students and university staff helps in the production chain (pre-assessment, formatting, layout design, etc.). Recently, given the institutional and democratic collapse brought about by the election of Bolsonaro in Brazil in 2018 (and by comparable phenomena such as the rise to power of Modi in India, Duterte in the Philippines, and Trump in the United States), I edited for Trabalhos em Linguística Aplicada a special issue on contemporary populisms, focusing centrally on digitalization (which has largely facilitated the emergence of current populisms). A sociolinguistics colleague (I prefer not to mention their name) contributed to the issue, offering an original and unpublished reflection on the problem. All articles in the collection were formatted by the diligent Esmeraldo Santos (a Black staff member in charge of the layout design of some six journals at Unicamp’s Language Institute), registered with a DOI, and received institutional affiliation and legal protection from Scielo Brazil, a publicly funded collection of open access journals. A few years after the special issue was out, however, I learned that our colleague’s article had been included in an edited book in the field, published by a prestigious UK publisher. Although the journal where I work as an editor holds the rights to the article, we editors have never been asked whether we would authorize its republication as a book chapter. I wonder if this Global North publisher would have made the same silent appropriation if the article had been hosted by a market-oriented publisher from Europe or North America.

I talked to friends about what to do in this situation. Some people suggested seeking institutional and legal channels to denounce the improper republishing of the article. Yet I decided to ruminate on the case and treat it as further evidence of how researchers like me, situated on the periphery of global knowledge production, are positioned in unequal dynamics of academic power.

Clearly, a journal like Trabalhos em Linguística Aplicada, despite its legal and institutional protection, is seen as irrelevant in the geopolitics of global knowledge. Reference CusicanquiCusicanqui (2019), for that matter, critiques the term “geopolitics of knowledge” (given its emphasis on “superstructures” rather than micro-practices such as the one I just exemplified) and suggests instead the term “political economy of knowledge.” Reference CusicanquiCusicanqui (2019, p. 114) lists among the reasons for her linguistic choice the fact that not only the “geopolitics of knowledge,” as commonly used in decolonial studies, “is a notion that is not put into practice (it rather raises a contradiction through gestures that recolonize the imaginaries and minds of intellectuals of the South), but also because it is necessary to leave the sphere of the superstructures in order to analyze the economic strategies and material mechanisms that operate behind discourses.” In other words, a “macro” view, oriented towards the geopolitics of knowledge, would certainly leave out micro-practices of precarization (and friendship) – such as the generous gesture of the colleague who (along with others) contributed to the special issue, Esmeraldo’s friendly work, the effort that editors, editorial assistants and other colleagues make to keep Brazilian publications open access, etc. To borrow Cusicanqui’s vocabulary, these “economic strategies and material mechanisms” are the fabric that weaves the production of public knowledge in Brazilian universities. This fabric has layers of precarization and playful and affective dialogue among Brazilian academics and their international colleagues. Yet on a different scale, the gesture of silently appropriating an article published in the “south” (under the precarious conditions I just unpacked) and “upscaling” it into a piece of scholarship published in the “Global North” tells an interesting story of how the precarious labor from the “Global South” feeds into some publishing practices in the “north” – more specifically, practices of producing current sociolinguistic knowledge.

The analyses and conclusions in this book’s chapters could be brought to bear on my own example of precarity and possibly those of many people working (or unemployed, or even underemployed) under the conditions of global neoliberalism. For instance, Hae Ree Jun and Junko Mori (Chapter 3, this volume), on the basis of a very fine-grained analysis of interactions at a restaurant that commoditizes “Japanese food” to customers in Toronto, suggest that “translingual practices, often romanticized as a representation of cosmopolitan conviviality, are built on power contestation over job security, chiefly by transnational workers who are positioned differently in the local and global labor markets”. Through analyzing the minutiae of interaction, they demonstrate that language resources do not have a pre-given value: Japanese managers and transnational servers negotiate their semiotic resources in an indexical order that hierarchically, and dynamically, layers the importance and efficacy of languages, scripts, conviviality, and other semiotic resources. Jun and Mori conclude that rather than looking for a flat and homogenous picture of repertoires, the best to do is to look at semiotic resources vis-à-vis their texture, entanglements, layers and “complex motivations as well as power relations at various levels”.

In my ethnography in a group of favelas (working class neighborhoods built by residents) in Rio de Janeiro, the field itself has demanded attention to such textures, layers, and complex “power relations at various power levels.” To pursue an understanding of how the precarity I observe is situated in history and in local and global threads is critical to avoid romanticizing the “playfulness” of my interlocutors. Laughter, joy, sarcasm, playfulness etc. are a conspicuous feature of interactions between favelados and faveladas (favela residents) – something that, at the beginning of field research in 2012, I imagined to happen “despite” a backdrop of police oppression, structural racism, and economic inequality that has historically beset favelas. By reading the work of Reference BakhtinBakhtin (1976), Reference GoldsteinGoldstein (2013), and Reference FacinaFacina (2020), I have tried to understand humor not as being expressed “in spite of” precariousness but “in response to” or “from” precariousness (see Reference FacinaFacina, 2020, p. 3). Reference BakhtinBakhtin (1976, p. 27), for instance, teaches us that humor in folk culture “has resisted official culture and developed its distinctive point of view of the world and distinctive image forms in which this view is mirrored.” A pioneer in the observation of metapragmatic discourse, Bakhtin analyzed humor in the works of Ukrainian writer Nikolai Gogol alongside his metadiscourse on the significance of playfulnes in folk humor. In his novels, Gogol entextualized fragments of the lower classes’ humor originally produced in oral history and concluded, among other things, that “[l]aughter is more significant and profound than is thought” (cited in Reference BakhtinBakhtin, 1976, p. 33).

In a fascinating linguistic ethnography of laughter in a Rio de Janeiro favela, Reference GoldsteinDonna Goldstein (2013, p. 2) describes her first impressions of the place of laughter in the communities in these terms:

As is the case of many chapters in this book and my own ethnography, examining playfulness does not necessarily mean ignoring precarity, but instead attending to something that may locally work, following Goldstein, as “a subtle window onto the forces” that undergird precarization.

Goldstein also points that in her fieldwork, humor was a “running commentary about (…) the contradictions of poverty in the midst of late capitalism.” As most chapters in this book examine peripheries – either peripheral countries or peripheral subjects in so-called central countries – examining the historicity of these capitalist contradictions is key to giving empirical density to the precariat’s “running commentaries.” In the last forty years – which coincide with the decline of the welfare state worldwide, the rise of income inequality, and the pervasiveness of neoliberalism – the workings of capitalism have been changing radically. Economist Reference MilanovicBranko Milanovic (2019, p. 43) has noted that the precarization of labor is a global trend, especially due to the “diminished power of labor vis-à-vis capital.” In capitalist economies, the “shift from manufacturing to services” has yielded different forms of special organization of workers – more distant from each other and from factory floors (Milanovic, p. 43). This has led to negative consequences for the strength of unions and organized labor movements. In peripheral regions of capitalism, the debate about the conflict between forces of labor and capital takes on an additional nuance. Reference Kasmir and SteinKasmir (2018, p. 5) reminds us that Marx had already theorized about the “reserve army of labor” in capitalism: “workers who are not yet brought into or who are episodically pushed out of the wage relationship, and whose presence depresses wages and functions to discipline restive working classes.” In the 1970s, studies on labor informality, such as Reference Machado da SilvaMachado da Silva’s (1971) in Brazil, and Reference HartHart’s (1973) in Ghana, drew attention to the importance of “informality” for understanding relations of production, labor, and consumption that did not fall within the formal scope of employment, regulated by labor laws and protections.

I would like to briefly describe here the backdrop of informality and labor precarization that affect the lives of my interlocutors in the field, in order to further elaborate on how their communicative practices – including playfulness, translanguaging, and enregistered communicative styles such as papo reto and funk music – respond to precarity (in addition, see Reference SilvaSilva, 2022a, Reference Silva2022b; Reference Silva and MaiaSilva & Maia, 2022). Brazil was subjected to one of the longest regimes of slavery in European colonialism – a brutal system of labor exploitation that was only reluctantly abolished in 1888, when the Brazilian monarchy was already in ruins and the country was to become a republic in 1889 (Reference MarquesMarques, 2019). Today, Blacks account for 54.9 percent of the population, yet they are the ones who disproportionately suffer the effects of colonial violence. Although the country has, since the 1940s, had a labor legislation that reflects achievements of workers’ movements, many favelados and faveladas (who are predominantly Blacks) survive on informal and precarious work. As for formal work, data from the last census in 2010 showed that the unemployment rate in Rio de Janeiro favelas (19.5 percent) was twice as high as in upper middle-class neighborhoods (9.9 percent). At the time, favela workers earned, on average, 5.3 times less than workers in wealthy areas (Reference NeriNeri, 2010, p. 55). Due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the inefficiency of Bolsonaro’s administration, the 2020 census was not carried out. However, surveys such as the 2020 DATA Favela point out that 80 percent of favela residents lost more than half of their income in the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition, 66 percent of residents said they could not abide by stay-at-home policies because they would have not been able support themselves for a week without going out to work (Instituto Locomotiva & Central Única das Favelas, 2020).

Given the theme of this book, a question that may be asked is: How to think about playfulness, laughter and joy in this scenario? Does such a long politics of producing precarious lives leave any room for well-being? Ethnographically, I have learned from interlocutors in the field that, yes, it is possible to think about playfulness, pleasure, and creative expansion in such a precarious context. But as Raphael Calazans, a young funk music MC and Black activist suggested to the research group I am part of, understanding the dialectical relation between playfulness and precarity in favelas – or, in his words, the relation between “laughing and crying” or “living and dying” – requires we cease to see these terms as dichotomies. Some background here will be helpful to explain how Calazans critiqued the binary view. Adriana Lopes had asked Calazans to write a narrative about his literacy trajectory (in our project on literacies in favelas, we had become very interested in the young favelado’s socialization in literacy agencies such as the evangelical church, funk music, the leftist party Partido Socialismo e Liberdade, and Polytechnical Health High School Joaquim Venâncio (see Reference Lopes, Silva, Facina, Calazans and TavaresLopes et al., 2017). Calazans titled his autobiographical narrative “Sobrevivências,” or Survivals, echoing a trope he himself had enunciated in a 2012 interview: for the young funk MC, in the favela, living and dying share a blurred boundary. Several times in his life, he has found himself in borderline situations between living and dying, as in occasional police raids against the drug trade. These are usually ill-planned, media-driven raids that leave many Black men like Calazans dead. For example, in July 2022, the Rio de Janeiro police performed one of its most brutal police raids in favelas, leaving at least eighteen people dead in the Complexo do Alemão (The Guardian, 2022). Against this backdrop of precariousness, Calazans wrote:

Calazans says: “Here, living and dying, crying and laughing, pain and joy are synonymous.” In 1976, the mathematician Miró Quesada coined at the Third Latin America Conference on Mathematical Logic the term “paraconsistent logic” as an alternative to Aristotle’s classical principle of non-contradiction (Reference Priest, Tanaka, Weber and ZaltaPriest, Tanaka, & Weber, 2022). The Greek philosopher proposed, and classical logic followed, the principle that opposite assertions cannot be true at the same time. But in a paraconsistent model, inconsistent or opposite assertions are not necessarily contradictory – and this explains how subjects account for inconsistencies in fields as distinct as dreams, collective decisions, and artificial intelligence. Brazilian mathematician Newton da Costa explains that inconsistencies between terms within assertions or other interactional domains “arise naturally in the description of the real world. This occurs in many contexts. Nevertheless, human beings are capable of reasoning appropriately” (Reference Costa and AbeCosta & Abe, 2000, p. 161). While I have pointed here to a logical explanation to justify the irreducibility of terms like “crying” and “laughing” to a dichotomous pair of opposites, several theories in our sociolinguistic toolkit would be equally effective for explaining this problem. For instance, Reference BlommaertBlommaert (2015, p. 106) suggested the term “sociolinguistic scales” to challenge flat and binary descriptions of communication (such as non-contraction in Aristotle’s logic) and think about the “nonunified, layered, and stratified nature of meaningful signs and their patterns of circulation.” In other words, we could argue that Calazans, in the excerpt above, is evoking dimensions of discourse (i.e., scales) from the (upper-)middle classes, which tend to associate “love scenarios” (e.g., in soap operas) to “beaches” (Complexo do Alemão is far from the sea) or to “rich” places. He challenges this discourse dimension by evoking another, layered one: there is love in places with poverty, hunger, and violence. In addition, if young Black men working in precarious and illegal markets in favelas are described in middle-class discourses as “evil and diabolical,” in Calazans’ experience they are people who had fun at the parties he attended.

In my field research and in the various contexts analyzed in this book, I read that playfulness and precarity are irreducible to binaries and essential, universal, and generalizing definitions. As interactional constructs, affects such as laughter and ontological precariousness, language resources such as translanguaging (or aspirations of homogeneity), and problems such as labor precarization are best explained contextually, preferably in dialogue with the subjects who are affected by these forces on a daily basis. In the title of this Afterword, I suggest that precarity and playfulness may be rendered as “forms of life.” Reference WittgensteinWittgenstein (1953) opposed the Augustinian picture of language – the view that everything that language does is to represent pre-existing thoughts – to the idea that language can be imagined as a “form of life” (Lebensform). “To imagine a language means to imagine a life-form” said the philosopher in one of a series of aphorisms where he contextualizes and critiques Augustine’s essential picture of language (Reference WittgensteinWittgenstein, 1953, §19). Note that Wittgenstein is speaking of imagination – to imagine language is to imagine ways of living. And the ways we live (and imagine) are multiple, contextual, non-unified, paraconsistent, beyond dichotomies, and situated in unequal societies. Imagining forms of life that do not surrender to or freeze in the face of precarity – and that may able to overcome it while keeping the interesting values produced in response to precariousness – seems to be an urgent task for sociolinguists.