Global South resistance to colonialingualism: An introduction

This introduction names colonialingualism as an ideology–policy–practice–outcome system that reproduces epistemic, linguistic, and racial hierarchies in language education through the privileging of dominant colonial knowledges, languages, and neoliberal valorizations of diversity. It distinguishes colonialingualism from adjacent frameworks (linguistic imperialism, monolingualism, and monoglossia critiques) by foregrounding its epistemic–racial–colonial engine and the human-exceptionalist “epistemological error”. From an explicitly Global South vantage point—geographic, positional, and epistemic—it maps positionality as praxis and traces how colonialingualism is reproduced across governance, curriculum, assessment, and method, arguing that countering it requires structural redesign rather than surface-level reforms. It outlines the book’s structure and chapter contributions: Part I (Theoretical foundations, methodological shifts, and pedagogical reimaginings), Part II (Indigenous knowledges, language revitalization, and educational reworlding), and Part III (Transformative practices, policy routes, and transnational community praxis). It presents the volume as a counter-practice companion and toolkit for pluriversal, relational, justice-oriented language education.