A Sociolinguistics of the South is a response to growing interest in multilingualism as a feature of mobility and the complexities of 21st-century diversities in both northern and southern contexts. It is a response that co-occurs with an increasing vocalization of challenges to coloniality that arise from several strands of decolonial thinking, multilingually circulating in Africa, Europe, the Américas, Asia, and the Pacific for much of the 20th century. The goal of this volume is to draw attention to key conditions in which southern multilingualisms arise within ecologies, environments, and human needs for consensual (and at times, non-consensual) engagement. These differ from northern contexts and conditions. The argument laid out here and throughout this volume is simply that it is not possible to provide a singular or universal perspective of sociolinguistics, or indeed multilingualism, from a northern perspective. A sociolinguistics of the south is one that is sensitive to the pluriversalities of language/multilingualism and the epistemologies, cosmologies, and ontologies from which it arises. It follows, therefore, that there cannot be only one sociolinguistics of the south; there will be many. The intention here is to prise open a space for conversations of sociolinguistics to continue among homo amans .
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