On 7 January 2021, Jan Blommaert died aged 59, after a ten-month battle with cancer. He was an extraordinary person and a brilliant academic, and there have been a great many very moving personal accounts of how much Jan meant to the people he interacted with. I knew and worked with him for over twenty-five years, and during his protracted illness, for me and for a lot of others, it was good to be able to tell him directly how much I owed him. But beyond the warm, hospitable, humorous and hugely energising individual we knew, Jan was profoundly committed to—indeed lived—a programme of sociolinguistics that he often traced to the writings of Dell Hymes, the founder of Language in Society.Footnote ¹ A number of this programme's core elements were spelled out in the introduction to Hymes’ ground-breaking 1969 collection, Reinventing Anthropology, a ‘book… for people for whom “the way things are” is not reason enough for the ways things are, who find fundamental questions pertinent and in need of personal answer’ (1969:7). For my account of the value and vitality that Jan brought to sociolinguistics, I have borrowed from the title of Hymes’ introduction, ‘The use of anthropology: Critical, political, personal’ and, as well as citing some of Jan's own words, I also draw on the reflections of othersFootnote ² as evidence of the vigour, clarity, and coherence with which he articulated a practice and purpose for work on language in society.

Jan's colleague, Sjaak Kroon, has summarised very well some of the facts of Jan's working life, moving into his contribution and style of working:

The opportunity for others to engage, contribute, accept, or reject. In Jan's own retrospection, ‘discussion and brainstorm were my favourite activities; they were in the most literal sense the ludic, fun, pleasure dimensions of academic life’ (Blommaert Reference Blommaert2020). And talking to him was often unforgettable, both in and outside university environments: ‘it was only one sentence, but it made all of my observations suddenly fall into place’ (Ico Maly Reference Maly2021a); ‘none of his stuff was boring. He had a way of making things sound crisp. Debatable. And transferable’ (Tom van Hout Reference van Hout2021); ‘while in the workshop, things would happen extraordinarily fast and you'd look back and realise their productivity’ (Jim Collins Reference Collins2021); ‘you told him a story and he turned it into theory…. Everything he said was so quotable’ (Panayiota Charalambous Reference Charalambous2021; Paty Paliokosta Reference Paliokosta2021); ‘I will never forget the moment when he broke the frame of teaching, with humour and high performance… There were simply layers upon layers to be learnt from that moment’ (Cathy Kell 2020); ‘every single, however brief, interaction with Jan felt like a profoundly transforming and learning experience. The trajectory was always of the following kind: at first, I would resist, be mystified, and in some disbelief vis-à-vis his ideas… only to subsequently find it as one of the most powerful treatments of the subject’ (Alexandra Georgakopoulou Reference Georgakopoulou2021); ‘all of us got on the train back to London. A climate of intellectual debate but also of humor and camaraderie was immediately established, [Jan contributing] substantially with two qualities—intellectual vivacity and an ability to have a good time with colleagues’ (Anna De Fina Reference De Fina2021); ‘brainstorming with Jan was one of the great privileges of working with him, and it often took place in the least obvious of times and spaces. During walks and drives, while waiting for trains’ (Piia Varis, p.c. 2021);

These accounts point to Jan's erasure of the lines between scholarship and living, operating with a reflexive habitus that Sirpa Leppänen also experienced in Jyväskylä: ‘His extensive reading, combined with his extraordinary ability to crystallize complex concepts and theorizations and to show their relevance to the empirical study of language and communication,… opened up new ways for us to do research—to live a researcher's life. He himself was an embodiment of such a life.’ (Leppänen Reference Leppänen2021). And in Jan's own formulation, what ‘still persuades people to choose a career in research’ is ‘the freedom to unthink what is taken to be true, self-evident and well-known and to re-search it, literally, as in “search again”. It is the freedom of dissidence—a thing we often hide, in our institutionalized discourses, behind the phrase “critical thinking”. I see dissidence as a duty in research, and as one of its most attractive aspects’ (Blommaert Reference Blommaert2020).

This dissidence was infinitely more than just a quest for novelty. It was grounded in a deep knowledge of classical social science and linguistics: ‘to understand what linguists do today, we need to historize it, look back in time and understand where it comes from. Jan writes: “Historicizing epistemologies and methodologies is a pre-requisite for critique. If we wish to improve particular kinds of analysis, it is essential that we remember where the tools for such an analysis come from, in what kind of épistème they are grounded, and what kind of ideological load they carry” (Reference Blommaert2013:6)’ (Ana Deumert Reference Deumert2021). It was disciplined by an exceptionally ‘keen capacity for the observation of minute linguistic and interactional phenomena’ (De Fina Reference De Fina2021). And it was driven by the conviction (which he attributed to Hymes) that ‘no social cause is served by poor work. Critical commitment demands a never-ending attention to theoretical and methodological improvement. If we believe that languages and their speakers should be equal, we have to understand their actual inequalities precisely and in detail’ (Blommaert Reference Blommaert2009b:242, Reference Blommaert2010b:686). But, he insisted,

Combining erudition, analytic acuity, and an ingrained sense that ‘science can never be submissive, never be a matter of “following a procedure” or “framework”’ (Blommaert Reference Blommaert2020), Jan had a charisma that propelled him into ‘celebrity culture in academia’. In the end, though, he stepped back from this experience, speaking critically of an emerging system in which

Quite rightly, he recognised his capacity to inspire, which was something that I often experienced myself, that I repeatedly saw with doctoral students at our linguistic ethnography summer school, and that others have amply affirmed: ‘little did I know then that his answer would change my life forever’ (Maly Reference Maly2021a); ‘for me as for so many others, encountering Jan was truly a life-changing experience’ (Rob Moore Reference Moore2021); ‘I remember reading this seminal work for the first time and being blown away… The book literally changed my academic trajectory’ (Christian Chun Reference Chun2021); he ‘pushed me to be a better version of myself. He spoke highly of his colleagues and PhD students. And drove them to excel’ (Van Hout Reference van Hout2021); ‘I remember Jan telling us about Stakhanovism; which means: doing more than is expected from you—and indeed, being ambitious and raising the bar continuously; that is one of the first life lessons Jan taught me’ (Annelies Verdoolaege Reference Verdoolaege2021); he ‘showed me—then a young academic at the beginning of her professional career—what academia and scholarship could be, the futures that were possible and our own responsibility in making them happen’ (Deumert Reference Deumert2021). But instead of seeing this ability as a personal trait of the kind one might (pseudo)modestly disclaim, Jan saw inspiration as an essential element in academic practice. Inspiration, he said,

Inspiration as academic practice had an essential corollary: ‘creating communities of academics from all corners of life’ (Najma Al Zidjaly Reference Al Zidjaly2021), going ‘to great lengths to make you feel like you belonged in academia’ (Van Hout Reference van Hout2021). ‘One thing remained constant, wherever Jan went, or whoever you talked to about him; he was generous and set up a system of democratic knowledge sharing wherever he went’ (Van der Aa Reference Van der Aa2021). He used his ‘preternatural gift for communication to foment scholarly collaboration on a global scale, building sustainable networks that brought together researchers from around the world to work on shared problems’ (Moore Reference Moore2021). ‘He always kept in touch with people with whom he had common interests through a stream of initiatives that were aimed at creating networks of collaboration and debate. Jan always was a team player and a proponent of collective initiatives’ (De Fina Reference De Fina2021). I can think of at least four such initiatives (with names) that I have participated in, and each has had a major impact on the direction and tenor of my work.Footnote ⁵ But the democratic knowledge sharing with people from all corners—what he and Van der Aa called ‘epistemic solidarity’ (Van der Aa & Blommaert Reference Van der Aa and Jan Blommaert2015)—extended further, well beyond the academy.

In one of his last publications, he wrote,

In consequence, in March 2020,

Knowledge activism, of course, generated conflict:

But he wasn't intimidated, and his knowledge activist critique also covered the counter-productive and anti-democratic structures of academic production.

So, for example, in the course of our language and superdiversity collaboration, we submitted an unsuccessful application to the EU's Horizon 2020 funding programme, spending hundreds of hours and several international trips worth several thousand Euros preparing the bid. Jan delivered the home truth:

Much more generally, early ‘experiences in African universities made me very much aware of the existence of several academic worlds, not the idealized one “academic community” sometimes invoked as a trope’,Footnote ⁶ and ‘inequality became the central theme in my work and academic practice from the first moment I embarked on it’ (Blommaert Reference Blommaert2020, my emphasis):

Where there was institutional flexibility, Jan could work very productively with university managers (and at the University of the Western Cape, he ‘worked in very close concert with… the most inspiring and energizing team of academic leaders I had ever met’ (Blommaert Reference Blommaert2020)). He ‘tirelessly discussed with his colleagues not only the work itself but also how we do the work as academics… [M]any a younger scholar, myself included, [is] indebted to him for valuable lessons on how to be an academic in neoliberal academia and the ways in which resistance is not, after all, futile’ (Varis, p.c. 2021). And maybe Jan's clearest intervention in the practicalities of scholarship was in academic publishing, an industry which in general, he argued, ‘has become a disgrace and is an obstacle to science, not a facilitator (let alone an indispensable actor)’ (Blommaert Reference Blommaert2020). Here he embraced open source publication, ‘opening up the closed system of academic publishing to professionals and students… who cannot afford to buy them’ (De Fina Reference De Fina2021), to ‘scholars from the Global South who can't afford the commercial versions of my work’ (Blommaert Reference Blommaert2020), and to people active in civil society (Maly Reference Maly2021a). He co-founded Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies Footnote ⁷ and Diggit Footnote ⁸ (an online magazine providing an alternative platform for information exchange and debate on digital culture, globalisation, and the arts), and he posted prolifically in blogs,Footnote ⁹ Facebook, tweets, and videos. On academia.edu,Footnote ¹⁰ his papers have over a quarter of a million views (an astonishing figure),Footnote ¹¹ and ‘you could always find his books first as ‘working paper’ previews somewhere for free, often to the annoyance of his publishers’ (Van der Aa Reference Van der Aa2021). At the same time, these practical interventions developed in continuous dialogue with theory and analysis, in which he opened ‘a new frontier for the analysis of political discourse with his… reflections on communication in the post-digital world’ (De Fina Reference De Fina2021), generating ‘new insights into notions of communities, user identities, and genres’ online (Georgakopoulou Reference Georgakopoulou2021).

In sharp contrast to Hymes’ work, which Jan deemed generally ‘tough reading’ (Reference Blommaert2010b:685), Jan's writing was ‘always didactic in nature[, taking] the reader, viewer, or student by the hand’ (Maly Reference Maly2021a), even though it sought to ‘give them a glimpse of what lies beyond, of the open terrain for which my writings offered no road map, but which my writings could help them to detect as open for exploration’ (Blommaert Reference Blommaert2020). ‘ “Write to be read” and “write a paper you'd like to read yourself” were pieces of advice Jan gave to all of his younger colleagues’ (Varis, p.c. 2021). But despite this difference, Hymes’ writing breached the traditional front- and back-stage boundary in academic work very much like Jan's, and it brought the practices, people and institutions producing analysis into the spotlight alongside the objects being studied, articulating a reflexive methodological programme that embraced intellectual inheritance and practical organisation alongside theory and empirical description (Blommaert Reference Blommaert2009a; Rampton Reference Rampton2009). In this way, both scholars innovated with channels of publication, Blommaert exploring the affordances of the internet, Hymes setting up Language in Society, sociolinguistics’ first journal. Like Blommaert, Hymes’ writing questioned university structures and deferential science, asking whether the future of the graduate department in anthropology would ‘prove to have been chrysalis or coffin’ (Hymes Reference Hymes and Hymes1969:7), declaring that ‘[p]roductive scholars know that problems lead where they will and that relevance commonly leads across disciplinary boundaries. Yet many an insecure academic compensates for [their] own lack or loss of intellectual [potency] by making it difficult or impossible for students and junior colleagues to benefit from theirs’ (Hymes Reference Hymes and Hymes1969:44–45). And Jan's undergraduate teaching achieved something parallel to what Hymes said could be ‘[t]he greatest contribution of anthropology departments[: T]o send into the world many lawyers, historians, activists, workers for various institutions and agencies, well training in anthropological work’ (Hymes Reference Hymes and Hymes1969:57). ‘From day one, [Jan] gave me and my former fellow classmates at Ghent University glasses through which to look at the world around us… Glasses which we still carry with us, and that allow us see the world, its people and their interactions in a totally different way… [S]ending us to do ethnographic fieldwork in the most intercultural areas of Ghent, we came back with a box full of data gathered that, as [he] had intended, completely altered our relationship with space, place and identity’ (Fie Velghe Reference Velghe2021).

But it is obviously a driving commitment to the development of ethnographic sociolinguistics that connects Blommaert to Hymes’ work most closely, integrating the productivity of two brilliant and innovative minds in a distinctive, powerful and sustainable intellectual programme. As Maly notes, Jan ‘always started from the idea that language is the architecture of society. Language, according to him, is always socially loaded. It has a history of use, and is used in society. It is not only the stuff that makes us social, it also is socially and politically consequential for humans’ (Maly Reference Maly2021b:3). Throughout his career, Jan took the details of linguistic practice as the point of departure for acute analyses that demonstrated how, for example, ‘the combination of linguistics and ethnography’ can produce a ‘layered, multi-scalar and empirically grounded understanding of ideology [that] is perhaps one of the most sophisticated ones in current social science’ (Blommaert & Rampton Reference Blommaert and Rampton2011:11). The depth and range of his reading made him a compelling advocate of sociolinguistics for people in other disciplines (as in publications like Durkheim and the Internet (Reference Blommaert2018b), strap-lined On Sociolinguistics and the Sociological Imagination). And again, this was something that Jan could tie to Hymes’ oeuvre: ‘This is how I prefer to remember him and to use Hymes’ legacy: as a framework that enables the incorporation of a vast field of social-scientific angles, tools and instruments. Hymesian sociolinguistics’ (Blommaert Reference Blommaert2010b:683).

A fortiori, however, the strands in Jan's practice cohere as the enactment of an approach to ethnography that he associated with Hymes. He scorned the idea that ethnography was just fieldwork-plus-descriptions-of-‘context’, and actually saw Hymes’ writing as ‘a victim of such reductions’ (Blommaert Reference Blommaert2009c:260). Instead, ethnography is ‘a general programmatic perspective on social reality and how real subjects, in real conditions of everyday life, possessed by real interests, make sense of reality’ (Blommaert Reference Blommaert2018a:ix, original emphasis). And as well as ‘including ontology and an epistemology’, Hymesian ethnography is ‘a democratic science’, a counter-hegemonic politics of knowledge (Hymes Reference Hymes and Hymes1980, Reference Hymes and Hymes1996; Blommaert Reference Blommaert2009c:260–61 et passim; Blommaert & Dong Jie Reference Blommaert and Jie2020:12). Indeed, beyond the elements of ethnography that people can develop through study and practise, beyond its programmatic features, ethnography—at its most reflexive—seemed to be in Jan's case a deeply ingrained, personal disposition. ‘He preached that theory always flows from specifics, that case studies aren't simply illustrations but are the raw material which allows for theorising’ because he was ‘an ethnographer at heart’ (Philip Seargeant Reference Seargeant2021, emphasis added). He wrote about globalisation because he lived it every day,Footnote ¹² and not even the most pressing personal circumstances could stop the productivity of his participant-observation. For about a year late on in his career, he experienced burnout, ‘but hearing Jan talk about how it blindsided him and made him feel utterly incompetent and vulnerable was an eye-opener… Jan talked about lying fallow, taking back control, slowing down science, and saying no to reproductive, gap-filling research… He normalized vulnerability and fallow time in the interest of science’ (van Hout Reference van Hout2021). Many of the quotations in the text here draw on what Jan wrote after his diagnosis with terminal cancer, and for many, this ‘was an important sign to other scholars, that one does not become a better academic by hiding the difficult sides to life’ (Martha Karrebæk Reference Karrebæk2021).Footnote ¹³

Critical, political, personal. Like all of us, Jan was unique, and his exceptional productivity was founded in the particularity of his marriage to Pika Colpaert, who ‘is the reason why I have been able to work the way I have,… the management who did almost all the administrative and organizational work necessary for my development’ (van Schijndel Reference van Schijndel2020). In that respect, the best we can do is simply rejoice that sociolinguistics was the focus for so much of Jan and Pika's extraordinary endeavour. But even though Jan was the exponent sans pareil and few can hope to match his brilliance, his originality, and his mobilising power across teaching, research, and activism, he affirms sociolinguistics as a programme with pedigree, purposes, and practices that he encourages—or rather, works to inspire—a great many others to join, as best they can. For some, Jan's life stands for

For others,

Plainly, the lines of uptake and engagement are open and unsettled, but wherever the reverberations, for me as for others, Jan stands as the shining contemporary validation of sociolinguistics.