Toward a transformative framework for decolonizing language education: An afterword

This afterword extends the volume’s work to counter colonialingualism, understood as the privileging of dominant colonial knowledges and languages within an ideology–policy–practice–outcome system. Drawing on evidence assembled across the volume’s chapters, it demonstrates both how colonialingualism operates and how it is countered. Conceptually, the volume consolidates colonialingualism as a robust, empirically grounded analytic, advances (trans)raciolinguistic perspectives, and centers on Indigenous and Southern epistemologies and multilingualisms as both theory and method. Practically, it offers designable moves, such as Sumud pedagogy, a pedagogical compass, translanguaging performances, Ubuntu literacies, life-story and autoethnographic methods, institutional space-making, policy routes, and platform and AI literacies. It foregrounds pragmatic diagnostics for detecting colonialingualism—across ideology, policy, practice, and outcome—and corresponding counter-practice levers spanning curriculum, assessment, classroom choreography, method, institutional change, Indigenous language revitalization, language planning and policy, place-based pedagogy, and refugee and migrant futures. The afterword invites pluriversal reworlding: collaborative, contextual, transepistemic transformation toward racial, epistemic, and linguistic justice in applied linguistics, language education, and TESOL.