Southern Visions of Language Policy

Abstract

This chapter contemplates what a critical Southern theory of Language Planning and Policy (LPP) might embody, offering the colonial development of Mother Tongue-based Bilingual Education (MTBE) policy in Ghana as a case study. LPP as a field of applied linguistics, and Critical LPP theories, have not sufficiently engaged with the epistemological South (Pennycook & Makoni, 2019). Empirical studies of LPP frequently reference Eurocentric frameworks for studying language in the Global South. Conversely, the chapter explores how educational language policy research that is steeped in a Eurocentric conceptualization of bilingual education and at odds with Southern epistemologies, has exacerbated the mistranslation of bilingual reforms in the South’s multilingual classrooms. I approach the discussion through decolonizing language lens that is embedded in conceptual instruments that Brazilian sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos proposes for epistemologizing Southern realities. The analysis draws on Santos’s (2001 , 2012 , 2016 ) concept of the “Sociology of Absences.” I argue that a Southern epistemology perspective must undergird Ghana’s vision of MTBE to liberate it from the Northern language hegemonic influence.

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