Abstract This article opens a conversation between disability studies and linguistics from the author’s positionality from the Global South. It argues that capacity building for both the abled and disabled in the North is implicated in the disablement of people in the Global South. A decolonial orientation to disability studies values vulnerability, relationality, and ethics which are less privileged in the academy. The article demonstrates how such a crip linguistics might facilitate a different understanding of language competence and analysis. Bringing out the ableism in dominant models of language competence, the article illustrates how linguistics might conceive communication as anomalous embodiment. Such an orientation will move from grammatical norms to nonnormativity, and diversity to multiplicity, as speakers engage with social networks and material ecologies for generating meanings in distributed practice motivated by relational ethics.
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