Translanguaging and Language Policy in the Global South: introductory notes

Abstract

T here seems no doubt in our view that translanguaging has taken a center stage as a viable strategy to transform learning and teaching practices that have historically followed the one-oneness ideology of the European Enlightenment.From the seminal work of Ofelia García (2009) on concept expansion and Li Wei and García (2014, 2022) on delineated pedagogical framings, and Makalela's (2016, 2022) cultural competence model of Ubuntu, translanguaging can no longer be ignored especially in the education domains globally.A plethora of studies in the recent years have demonstrated the efficacy of adopting translanguaging as both a theoretical and pedagogical practice (e.g., LI WEI; LIN, 2019) that sit at the center of decoloniality and transformation for the Global South ways of acting, knowing and being (e.g., NDHLOVU; MAKALELA, 2021).Here, we use Global South as a geopolitical space of marginalization that was orchestrated by the grandiloquent narratives of the West and acts of colonization and slavery.In this connection, choices around language use are the epicenter of such marginalization.Although huge strides have been made of translanguaging as an alternative well suited for the Global South, its interface with orthodox language policies have not been cogently addressed.At best, it is diffused, unclear, and limited in what seems like a translanguaging paradox where a distinction between socially named languages and the individual repertoires grounded in actual languaging practices becomes both necessary and unnecessary at the same time.We conceived of this Special Issue to specifically solicit the state-of-the-art views on this

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